The election of a new father in God reconfigures the Catholic Church. The Church is part institution and, with a father in God, part family; a symbiosis of two different modes of being.
A new pope brings the opportunity to assess his gifts as leader of the institution and also to learn to love him as our “father in God”.
To love our pope we have to get to know him. And so Catholics all over the world are getting better acquainted with Pope Leo XIV, the former Cardinal Bob from Chicago.
Already the furore over conflicting information about his allegiances has begun.
If you come from Chicago you will know that what amounts to hysteria about disinformation has erupted. And for once it’s not about the the Latin Mass, important though it is.
It is about what kind of baseball fan Bob was – a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan.
His dad, aptly enough, supported the St Louis Cardinals. But one brother, thinking he knew the answer, actually got it terribly wrong. Family don’t always know best. Their mother was from the north side of Chicago, and so he simply presumed Bob would support the Cubs.
Even brothers can get it wrong. It turned out the Cardinal Prevost was a Sox supporter. The White Sox baseball team went wild with joy.
A local fast food joint jumped on the cheery bandwagon. They now advertise themselves with the jaunty Latin tag, “Canes nostros ipse comedit” (he has eaten our dogs).
But with every hour that passes, a profile of our new pope is being put together to help us understand what the new election has brought the Church.
The easiest analysis was to reflect on the significance of the name Cardinal Prevost chose.
Leo has several obvious connotations. Leo the Great not only initiated the most powerful reforms of the Church of his day. In 452 he personally confronted Attila the Hun and persuaded not to attack and sack Rome.
In the conflict between the forces of paganism and the Church he proved to be a saviour of the Church.
But Leo XIII, as the direct predecessor, may claim to be a more proximate inspiration.
Pope Leo XIV addressed the question of his papal name almost immediately:
“There were many reasons, but mainly Leo XIII who in his historical encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question, in the context of the first Industrial Revolution…In our own day the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her teaching in response to another Industrial Revolution – in the field of Artificial Intelligence that poses new challenges to human dignity.”
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