I would willingly have served an authentic master — a royal prince or a king. You can put your two hands folded within those of another and swear faith as a vassal… Of course it’s easy enough to say that many a feudal lord in the past owed his fief to the money-bags his miserly father had left him, but whether he won it or not at the point of the sword, he had to defend it with the sword as he would have defended his life, for such a man and his fief were identified even to the very name which stood for both. Is not this mystic identification also a sign of royalty?
-Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest
I’ve had two revelations since Pope Leo was elected – one dramatic but unsurprising, the other startling, if only to me. The first is how clear it is becoming that many, if not most, Catholic trads are not actually traditionalists; the second is that I, apparently, am a traditionalist.
First, the trads: in the initial set of comments on Pope Leo, some were hopeful, some harsh, some both – yet even where something of a reverential sense was present, all was cast in terms of its conformity or dissonance with the future of the Church as they see it: that is to say, with the promotion and propagation of the Vetus Ordo/TLM, preferably universally and exclusively.
Perhaps the Pope will do what they are hoping for; I’d be surprised, but I won’t argue with him, if he does. However, there is a deeper point: adherence to forms understood as traditional does not the traditionalist make. There is something distressingly political – dare I even say democratic? – about their approach. Rather than a sovereign who embodies the collective in his person, they seem to be seeking a representative who will govern in accord with their express will and consent. There is a way in which this echoes the cosplay Christendom of the (so-called) Christian nationalist – a very present-coded appeal to the past, a notional appeal to a world-view and way of life that was never actually lived and inhabited by those issuing the appeal.
As for me, I’m surprising myself. As I mentioned in an earlier piece, I experienced a period of adjustment at the beginning of the Francis papacy, and expected the same with his successor. This has not proven to be so. There has been no adjustment. I love Pope Leo XIV – not for anything he has said or done, not for anything that I anticipate him saying or doing, and certainly not for anything I am hoping for him to say or do. I love him because he is the pope.
I would love to attribute this to an ongoing growth in spiritual maturity, from the adolescent who fervently hoped for Pope Pius XIII (no, not this guy), through the adjustments of the previous papacies, to my present-day Catholic docility. However, I doubt this – my spiritual maturing has been more along the lines cited by the great Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (does that name-drop make me look traditionalist?), who noted that some may be proceeding on the path of Christian perfection , but at a rate which would require for its attainment significantly more than a natural human lifespan. I have also considered whether the Holy Father’s being a fellow American (in the narrower, USA sense) might have something to do with this – and it well might; I was finding similar sentiments in comments on papal-themed articles online, specifically from marginal and non-practicing American Catholics. Yet I actually think the credit for this transformation should go (if not solely to Pope Leo himself) to… Pope Francis.
How is this so?
I remember how easy it was to identify Pope St. John Paul with so much beyond himself – his larger-than-life history and public persona, his role in the collapse of the Soviet bloc, his symbolic status in his country and beyond. And he was a philosopher and theologian – as am I, the former by profession, the latter at least aspirationally. As for Benedict – I could not but be awed a thousand times over by plausibly the greatest theologian ever to occupy the Chair of Peter and thereby a formidable philosopher per accidens, a genius, a man hailed by Nobel-Prize-winning novelist (and agnostic) Mario Vargas Llosa as perhaps the last classically educated intellectual to tread the world stage. It was easy, particularly for the bookish Catholic of a certain age, to assume that the papacy inherently involved something outside of the ordinary human business of being human.
Pope Francis, if I may say so, was human, was himself – himself, and so much himself as to scandalize some who expect the individual personality of a sovereign to fill out the role of a sovereign. Sometimes it happens, but it doesn’t need to – and sometimes it’s good that it not do so. Sometimes we can all too easily get the idea that a sovereign is some kind of special being, a Marvel superhero with better taste in clothes. When Francis stepped out onto the loggia and said “Buona sera” (a moment that continues to irk the trads today), he opened up a realm of new possibilities, to those who were put off by the trappings of sovereignty and to those who were mesmerized by them.
Some may be familiar with this quote, from G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics:
When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward – in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
I’m not putting Francis down, any more than Chesterton was putting down St. Peter (however much it sounds as if he were). Yet this is so to the point: Francis was a man, and by being a man, he breathed life back into the office, before it became a formal symbol, a totem, off-putting to some and magical to others.
So much of what Francis did can be understood better in this light. For instance, when he chose to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae rather than the Apostolic Palace, his choice was seen by most secular sources as an embrace of simplicity and humility, while others (mainly trads) took it as a rebellious refusal to adapt himself to his office. What he said himself was more natural and more direct:
I was always looking for a community. I did not see myself as a priest on my own. I need a community. And you can tell this by the fact that I am here in Santa Marta. At the time of the conclave I lived in Room 207. (The rooms were assigned by drawing lots.) This room where we are now was a guest room. I chose to live here, in Room 201, because when I took possession of the papal apartment, inside myself I distinctly heard a ‘no.’ The papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is not luxurious. It is old, tastefully decorated and large, but not luxurious. But in the end it is like an inverted funnel. It is big and spacious, but the entrance is really tight. People can come only in dribs and drabs, and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.
As I said, Pope Francis was a man, and a priest. And save for the Renaissance splendor of the corridor outside and the 1970s-ish stained glass of the chapel skylight, the papal apartments look rather like the public areas in an expensive hotel. Pope Francis chose – nay, discerned – what would support his life, his priesthood, and his papal ministry, and the papal apartments were, as he put it, a “no.” Honestly, at first glance, it seems pretty reasonable.[1]
Another case which caught the imagination of the secular press demonstrates this principle pointedly: Francis’s friendship with a group of impoverished and exploited trans persons from South America, some of whom were chosen as official mourners at his funeral. The pope came to know this community through Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner, who dispersed food, medicine and supplies to them during the pandemic, as well as providing through the Vatican the Covid vaccines that they, as undocumented persons, had been refused by the government. As the cardinal put it, “I don’t understand why this is getting so much attention. This is ordinary work for the Church, it’s normal. This is how the Church is a field hospital.”
Ideologues on both sides of the spectrum analyzed the pope’s friendships in this community, puzzling over what they might mean about his disposition toward LGBTQ+, or how this accorded with his disparagement of gender ideology. Yet there is no reason to believe the Holy Father was saying anything about gender identity or sexual exploitation; these people were the South American poor whom he had known and to whom he had ministered from his time in Buenos Aires and before. He spoke to them – and they, no doubt, to him – in a voice of well-understood experience.
Pope Leo, too, is coming from a place of experience – as a pastor; as a missionary; as a religious and a leader of a religious community; as a diocesan bishop and a curial cardinal; as an administrator, a dual citizen, a polyglot and a world traveler. Born in the Midwestern United States to a family conformed neither to stereotypical urban ethnic Catholicism nor to the thoroughly assimilated suburban Catholic experience, he seems admirably formed to fit the vessel of the papacy, with neither larger-than-life gifts nor sharply defined individualities – or, rather, with his most prodigious gift being flexibility and adaptability at a very high level.
Or perhaps not. Who knows? Frankly, it’s none of my business – none of anyone’s business. The Holy Father has a life and a ministry to lead, over the years that remain to him. Nor is it our business as Catholics to map out for him how he is to carry out this ministry – the grace for this was given to him, not to us. To return to the providential (if misguided) question that Dennis Knapp[2] at the Latin Right posed to us during what proved to be the last weeks of Pope Francis’s life, if the Holy Father sees the need to highlight aspects of Church teaching or foster liturgical priorities different from those emphasized by Francis, that is his right – Francis places no obligation on him to follow his program, any more than his predecessors in the papacy obligated Francis to follow their lead (however much exaggerated the variances among our recent papacies have been, to my mind). Whatever may come, I am and will be grateful for the Holy Father’s guidance and will adjust to his vision.
Yet somehow I do not feel like I will need to adjust much – not that I expect that I will be enthused in advance about everything he chooses to do, much less that I would presume to expect him to agree with me about anything. It was already well into Francis’s papacy that my old professor Rocco Buttiglione pointed out a serious ground for offering docility and support to Francis: “After all, he is the pope.”
…and Leo XIV is the pope now. It’s as simple as that. If that makes me a traditionalist, or a medieval peasant for that matter, so be it. Ad multos annos, Holy Father.
[1] Not that his predecessors (really, only the ten or so of them since Pius IX; the apartments actually aren’t so old as all that) were wrong to do otherwise: for example, the papal apartment was an eminently appropriate space for Pope Benedict’s 20,000-volume library – though less so for certain others of Benedict’s passions; happily, he was able to make up for lost time through his last years as Pope Emeritus in the Mater Ecclesiae.
[2] By the way, Dennis, if you’re reading – I wasn’t around when Mike Lewis made the decision to shut off comments on the site, although judging by the uneven level of charity I see even on SmartCatholics, I tend to agree with his decision. But I do ask: Progressive Catholic? Really? I’ve been going for vanilla middle-of-the-road. Seriously, I think we’re about as ideological as a church bulletin, and would have about the same readership, if normie Catholics were as highly online as the extremists on all sides.
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
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