Pope Leo and the Hermeneutics of Continuity

The speculations about what kind of pope Leo XIV will be range from outrageous scurrility to overenthusiastic embrace. I have read terrible things on the far end of the ultra “conservative” enclaves on the Internet and ridiculous things from the official liberal “Catholic” who seems to be whistling past the cemetery. Not only do some of the modernist voices chant “santo subito” about the recently deceased Holy Father, they want to make his successor a kind of Francis Redux.

Only God knows how things will work out, but I sincerely doubt that Pope Leo will be Francis 2.0 or even 1.5. I am just an observer from afar, but one of the things that I wonder about concerns the reaction of Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga to the pre-conclave meetings of the cardinals.

According to a liberal “Catholic” magazine, the cardinal, a great friend of Pope Francis, “left Rome with a sense of bitterness and disillusionment, 12 years after he contributed decisively to the election of Pope Francis.” The National Catholic Reporter said that an Italian daily (Il Fatto Quotidiano) “said that at the general congregations he witnessed the unraveling of the pro-Francis alliance, with many former supporters of the pontiff now becoming, in his words, ‘turncoats.’”

This is significant from a man who not only influenced the election of Pope Francis but also was a close confidant of the Holy Father. He is another one of those prodigious polyglot churchmen with several languages at his command and a network of influence worldwide. I met Cardinal Rodríguez several times, and he was an extraordinarily astute leader and Church politician. If he was disappointed about what he felt was in the wind before the conclave, I would think that things were not boding well for the chosen candidate(s) of the Francis loyalists among the eminences.

Some “conservatives” (a word with so many different meanings that it is almost useless sometimes) didn’t like that Pope Leo had been appointed to the dicastery of bishops by Pope Francis. It did not encourage them that the new pope mentioned his predecessor several times and even talked about continuing in some way Francis’ legacy.

The new pope was obviously personally loyal to the pope, as we would expect every Catholic, every bishop, and especially every head of a dicastery would be. I think all the noises he made about his gratitude and appreciation of his predecessor were, in some ways, de rigueur as part of the Vatican structure. It might make some people happy to hear of “going in a different direction,” but it would alarm most of the Church and unnecessarily upset a significant part of the leadership. If in the Dark Ages a pope could disinter his predecessor and dramatically disown the other’s decision, it would be an absurd and frightening tactic in our present age.

Those afraid of “Francis 2.0,” or whatever, should be patient. A ship could upset both cargo and passengers taking sharp turns. A gentle and gradual approach is better and also takes advantage of some of the positive coordinates of the voyage so far. I think that Pope Leo is not going to have a “hermeneutic of discontinuity” but one of “continuity.”    Those afraid of “Francis 2.0,” or whatever, should be patient. A ship could upset both cargo and passengers taking sharp turns. Tweet This

He is a canonist, of a temperament much different from his predecessor, as much different as his background and experience is different. A priest who would definitely be called “conservative” in my diocese said to me about some of the critics of Pope Leo, “Why don’t they let the pope be his own man?”

I think the answer to that question is that some people have a bit too much skin in the game to be patient. The Tablet enthused that the election of Pope Leo was 

a win for the Catholic Church, a win for the world’s poor—and a win for the late Pope Francis. As the pieces of the conclave jigsaw come together, it becomes clearer how Francis had managed to influence the outcome in advance, and in particular how he had planned to ward off the conservative and traditionalist forces in the Church who wanted a very different papacy to follow his own.

Where the Holy Spirit might have fit in the conclave “jigsaw” is something The Tablet is apparently not worried about. Just as a political narrative, the exultant note about an unknown quantity and quality (do they know Pope Leo?) appears to be something out of Robert Harris’ awful novel about the election of a hermaphrodite pope. Interpreting the operations of Divine Providence in and for the Church by the light of some tweets of the new Holy Father before the election seems like a lot of wishful thinking. There is a symmetry in this “dream a little dream with me” approach of claiming the new pope as one’s own and the concern of a fanatically ultra-reactionary blog that published a photo of the pope’s high school yearbook message to a classmate as doomsday prophecy.

Everyone on the radical discontinuity side of the spectrum loves that Leo XIII, whom his namesake admires, was aware of political and social issues and their theological perspectives. Of course, such people do not appreciate in the same way the pontiff’s Thomism or the prayers at the foot of the altar that Pope Leo added to the ritual, especially the St. Michael Prayer. Nor do the “liberals” seem to recognize the irony that a pope who spoke against the “Americanist” heresy now has an American successor who consciously identifies with his legacy.

Pope Francis’ first encyclical was an example of the hermeneutic of continuity in that he completed the cycle of encyclicals of Pope Benedict. That sainted pontiff had written about Charity and Hope; and Pope Francis “wrote” Lumen Fidei to finish the trilogy, apparently using some of Pope Benedict’s draft. In fact, the writing to me reveals the quilting together of the writing style of the two popes (not necessarily to the advantage of Pope Francis’ part in the enterprise). 

I read that Pope Francis once asked his predecessor for his gloss on something that he had written and received such a voluminous and detailed commentary from the German theologian- pope that he never asked for Benedict’s reactions again. The “discontinuity” hermeneutic some of the liberals rejoiced in about Pope Francis was not, I think, about a conscious decision but about an emotional and personal reaction—not an intellectual one. Pope Francis was consistently inconsistent in some of his opinions, something you could not accuse Pope Benedict of doing and neither, I hope, our new careful canonist Pope Leo XIV.

My conclusion: buckle your seatbelts, ideologues; we are in for a smooth ride and a basic principle of continuity in the next papacy.