like Kremlinologists during the Cold War, American Catholics are searching for clues to the character of their new pope. Conservatives take heart that he wore the red mozzetta that Pope Francis had spurned and sings the Regina Caeli in Latin. Progressives hang their hats on his repeated assurances that he will continue efforts toward greater synodality and the fact that he took the name of a pope best known for his social teaching. All this is in service of a single question: How much will Leo be like Francis, the pope who made him a bishop and a cardinal? The exercise is as old as the papacy itself, but also a bit silly. No pope is just like his predecessor and the extent of the overlap will only be revealed as the years unfold. What we can say with certainty of Pope Leo XIV, besides the quite shocking fact of his being an American, is that his formation as a Catholic priest and canon lawyer was after the Second Vatican Council. Ten years old in 1965, when the Council closed, everything about his Catholic life has been post-conciliar. Another way to put this is that Pope Leo is a Catholic Boomer. Is this good news?
I recently watched an interview on EWTN, in which a Dominican theologian expressed the hope that our first post-conciliar pope would get the Church off the “merry-go-round” of wearisome debates over the proper interpretation of the Council. In his view, the choice of a “pre-conciliar” name signals a desire to move beyond these disputes and to solidify, as Leo XIII did in his own time, the Church’s mission to a world in urgent need of the perennial truths of reason and faith. A similar view, albeit from across the ideological divide, can be found in Daniel Rober’s recent essay “Living Vatican II: Pope Leo heralds the dawn of the ‘post-post-conciliar’ era.” Rober, a theologian at Sacred Heart University, also sees in Leo’s age a chance to move beyond debates about the Council, although he has a very different idea of what this will mean.
To make his point, Rober divides the post-conciliar era into three stages. The first began in 1965. The Council had closed with great fanfare and optimism, but the shocks to the system soon stymied St. Paul VI’s papacy in a morass of unsettled disputes over sexuality, women in the Church, and governance. St. John Paul II learned the lesson and initiated a second stage in the Council’s reception. While he sought to implement his own reading of Vatican II, sometimes quite boldly, John Paul II downplayed and even suppressed discussion of the controversial elements that had so dogged his predecessor. Benedict XVI followed suit with his own hermeneutic of “reform in continuity.” This all, however, came to a crashing end with the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2013. According to Rober, “The signature achievement of Pope Francis was to reignite the spirit of the Council precisely to prepare the Church for a new era.” He did so by bringing to the fore issues stirred up by the Council, but long sidelined. For this, Rober claims, Francis suffered at the hands of critics who had convinced themselves that the Council’s innovations could be buried by reference to the “great tradition.” The villain here is Bishop Robert Barron, who Rober criticizes for his caricature of the decade after Vatican II as “beige Catholicism” filled with bad liturgy and silly preaching. Such a dismissal, in Rober’s judgment, ignores the fact that many of the questions that roiled Catholicism in those years came directly out of the Council and remain pertinent.
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