One hundred fifty-five years ago, when the freshly minted Kingdom of Italy conquered the rump of the Papal States and Pope Pius IX withdrew behind the Leonine Wall as the “prisoner of the Vatican,” elite European opinion pronounced the papacy finished as a factor in history — and, it was often assumed, the Catholic Church as well.
Well.
Last month, the election of Pius IX’s 12th successor riveted world attention as no other change of institutional or governmental leadership possibly could. Much credit for that goes to Pope Leo XIII, who, between 1878 and 1903, invented the modern papacy as an office of global moral teaching and an instrument of global moral witness. Concurrently, Leo set in motion the dynamics that led to the growth of the Catholic Church into a global communion of 1.4 billion people — a worldwide community of diversity and inclusion like none other. Pope Leo XIV is too intelligent, too given to good manners, and too shrewd to have said it, but when he stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on the night of May 8, this son of the American Midwest might well have said, playing variations on a theme by Mark Twain, “Rumors of the Church’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
Those of us in Rome in those electric days could not fail to have been impressed by the enthusiasm that greeted the 267th Bishop of Rome. Yet it struck me then, as it strikes me now, that there are potential downsides to the Petrocentrism — the tight focus on the papacy and the pope as the index of All Things Catholic — that has been on display throughout the Catholic world for some time now.
There is good news here, to be sure. The world needs an adult speaking in adult terms into a global communications ecosystem too often dominated, and thus marred, by the soundbite and the tweet — and Leo XIV has already demonstrated just how to do that. The world needs someone who can shine the bright light of truth into the darkness of conflict and war, and Leo XIV has already done that, too. 1.4 billion Catholics need a reference point for the unity that is one of the four marks of the Church — and by reminding us that this year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, Leo XIV has shown us exactly where the template of that unity-in-truth is to be found.
Petrocentrism has its downsides, however.
What happens in Rome does not even begin to exhaust what is happening in, to, and with the Catholic Church throughout the world. In the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II taught that the Church does not have a mission, as if mission were one of a dozen things the Church does. No, the Church is a mission, an evangelical mission defined by Christ himself in Matthew 28:19: “Go and make disciples of all nations.”
Thus what happens in Father Bill Ryan’s Togo Mission, or on the campuses served by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or in the vibrant pastoral life of the Archdiocese of Bamenda in Cameroon, or amongst the heroic priests and people of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or in Church-supported crisis pregnancy centers and hospice facilities, or in Jimmy Lai’s solitary witness in a Hong King prison cell — what happens in your local parish — is at least as important, and often more important, than what happens in Rome.
At the American founding, there were some 25,000 Catholics in the United States, and it’s a safe bet that fewer than one hundred of them knew the name of the pope (Pius VI, as it happens) or what he did. The pendulum has now swung hard in the opposite direction, such that too many Catholics are preoccupied — intensely, even frantically — with what’s afoot in Rome: an unhappy conjunction, I suggest, of the politicization of everything with 21st-century entertainment culture. An interest in life at the Church’s administrative center is fine; an obsession with it, fueled by ill-informed blogs and social media, is not. It distorts the global Catholic reality even as it raises both unwarranted anxieties and misguided hopes.
Pope Leo XIV has an immense task ahead of him. Let us keep him, daily, in our prayers. Let us also do him the service of not dissecting every sentence he speaks, every initiative he undertakes, or every appointment he makes as if the Church’s future were hanging in the balance. That adds yet another burden to those Robert Prevost assumed when, a Chicago White Sox fan and thus a man familiar with suffering, he said “Accepto” in the Sistine Chapel a month ago.
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