Pope Leo XIV

Now that our daughter is married as of last saturday, I will be gradually getting through a backlog of items that have accumulated during the period of preparation for this event. These include the recent Canadian election, on which I will shortly publish my thoughts; the political chaos south of the border; and the new pope. In many ways, the third item is more readily addressed than the first two, so I begin with that.

I have now lived through eight papacies. Given that successive conclaves of cardinals generally choose older men to fill the office, the length of a particular papacy is typically fairly short. Pope John XXIII reigned for only five years, yet his legacy has endured in the form of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The recently departed Pope Francis was on the papal throne for a dozen years. John Paul II reigned for an unusually long 27 years, during which he managed to contribute to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its bloc of client states, including his native Poland. In the 19th century, Pius IX broke the record for length of tenure, reigning for 31 years, during which he convened the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), setting the agenda for the Roman Catholic Church into the mid 20th century.

Pope Francis died suddenly, but not altogether unexpectedly, on 21 April, just three weeks ago and on the day after both western and eastern churches celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The cardinals—princes of the church—assembled in Rome's Sistine Chapel and chose Francis' successor with remarkable speed. The new Pope is the second to come from the western hemisphere, but the biggest surprise for most of us is that he is an American by birth, although in adulthood he acquired Peruvian citizenship. Robert Francis Prevost is younger than I am by nearly six months, and he was born on the south side of Chicago, only 12 miles from my own birthplace. In addition to English, he speaks Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, and he reads German and Latin.

Leo XIII

When he chose Leo XIV as his papal name, many of us immediately understood why. His predecessor Leo XIII appears in all three of my published books, my PhD dissertation, and in others of my writings as well. Born Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci in 1810, Leo became pope in 1878, following the death of Pius IX, and reigned until his own death in 1903 at the advanced age of 93. His papacy occurred during a significant era of European history, when the political ideologies engendered by the French Revolution were reshaping the political landscape and the industrial revolution was producing widespread social and economic dislocation. Today Leo XIII is known, first, for pointing the Catholic intellectual tradition to a recovery of Thomas Aquinas' thought, and, second, for articulating a body of Catholic social teachings for an industrial age. Both of these led in the late 19th and 20th centuries to the rise of christian democratic parties in several European countries. Leaders of the successors of these parties played a huge role in shaping post-1945 Europe and establishing what would become the European Union.

Leo's best known encyclical, or pastoral letter, is Rerum Novarum, subtitled "On the Condition of the Workers," or "On Capital and Labour" (1891). In this and in his later encyclicals, Leo set forth a distinctively Christian alternative to the dominant ideologies of liberal capitalism and socialism, both of which threatened the larger social order. As developed by Leo and his successors, Catholic social teachings would come to be characterized by a balanced emphasis on solidarity and subsidiarity. Solidarity signifies that human beings are responsible to care for each other as they live out their lives before the face of God. Subsidiarity means that responsibility properly belongs to the lowest possible agents in a social hierarchy, the higher agents stepping in to offer assistance only if the lower agents fail temporarily to fulfil their responsibilities. This is the Roman Catholic counterpart to Abraham Kuyper's doctrine of sphere sovereignty, or what I have referred to as societal pluriformity, or the pluriformity of authorities.

In writing about the new Pope, I must keep in mind that, as a Reformed Christian and a member of a Reformed church, I am not officially a member of his flock. However, given that the Roman Catholic Church is the largest branch of Christendom, numbering over a billion in its membership, all Christians have a stake in what happens in that communion. I pray for God's blessing on Pope Leo's ministry and that the gospel will advance under his leadership.