My 4-year-old granddaughter, Alice, and I are looking at a picture book. It’s Jan Pienkowski’s masterful “Haunted House,” written in the ’70s, but still wholly enjoyable.
Each page is a fold-out with multiple doors to open, creepy closets and kitchen cupboards to explore, each revealing scary but humorous monsters and ghosts whose eyes roll backward as you turn the page levers. Lift the paper toilet lid, and a weird cat pops up. Alice and I are absorbed in the book until suddenly my husband calls from the kitchen.
“There’s white smoke!” He’s been on his phone, and saw reports that on the second day of the conclave, a new pope has been elected. It seems the whole world has been holding its breath for this moment.
I quickly open my phone and see a set of double doors, closed and curtained, standing behind a balcony. Alice is intrigued. In our culture, even the young gravitate toward a screen. A reporter relates that often it takes only 30-some minutes after the smoke emerges for a new pontiff to appear. It’s past that time now. It’s any minute. Alice is beginning to be as interested in those closed doors as I am. “Let’s go watch on TV,” I suggest. “You can bring the book.”
Soon, the whole world, all of us, would see Pope Leo XIV emerge, an American-born pope. In the camera’s close-up, you could almost see the weighty emotion on the man’s face and in his eyes.
Then, quickly, the press scramble began, hoping for the best interviews, the best “angle.” Everybody wanted a story. Wanted to hear from his two brothers back in the U.S. And here’s a find: a guy who knew him for years beginning in grade school. We heard people call the former Robert Prevost “Rob,” a jarring papal familiarity previously unknown to Catholics on this side of the pond.
Talking heads popped up everywhere, like little ghosts in our haunted house book. Everyone had a theory. Was he liberal, conservative, a traditionalist? What could we make of his earlier remarks on social media critical of the American administration’s immigration policy, of J.D. Vance’s faulty Catholic theories on love?
Then there was the oft-quoted remark by the late Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, that there would not be an American pope until the U.S. was in decline as a world power. That one seemed prophetic. We’re still a rich, nuclear-powered titan on the world stage, but morally and politically we sense our decline. Habeas corpus and due process are challenged. The traditions and protocols of our history are threatened. The poor grow poorer while the rich grow only richer. We alienate our allies and neighbors. We abandon leadership on the environmental crisis. A sense of meanness pervades.
Meanwhile, a missionary priest emerged from behind the veiled doors. He commands no armies, but we pray desperately that Pope Leo’s moral weight, and ours as he guides us, can make the world and our country a more peaceful place, a community of love and welcome, a place where all are respected and the common good is the common standard.
My heart keeps going back to those closed balcony doors, to the hopeful expectation I felt. For us, and for Pope Leo, every morning is a chance to open a door and step again unto the balcony of our lives in the name of Jesus.
In a world torn by war and so desperately in need of moral leadership, I pray that we won’t get tied up in petty church arguments and discord, but will unite behind this good man.
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