Leone XIV’s style is the benchmark

Listening to Pope Leo XIV speak about Europe in Metz was instructive. The Catholic Church values continuity even whilst pursuing renewal. Leo naturally quoted Francis, as is customary when referring to one’s august predecessor on the papal throne. In reality, we have moved, without too many upheavals or dramatic changes, and without anything particularly striking, from a tormented, Dostoevskian Jesuit, from a charism of abandonment and detachment from the Western heart of the Latin Rite Church, from an honest man yet oppressed by a sense of guilt channelled into a confused evangelical theology of the people, to a Goncharovian intellectual, with a lazy and defeatist demeanour, like Oblomov, as delicate and seemingly unresolved as the other was tenacious and revolutionary. In reality, Leone was only too ready to choose Metz as a political stop on his pastoral visit to France, to celebrate, with measured words, the former Foreign Minister Robert Schuman as the venerable founder of a Europe of market and monetary reconciliation—a future saint of a purest creation born of the spirit of commercial capitalism, of the culture of democracy, of the myth of prosperity and of the rediscovered union between age-old enemies in the triumph of procedure, of law and rights, of perpetual negotiation between reconcilable interests without recourse to state violence and the rhetorical humbug of nationalism.

It is typically Augustinian to observe the looming barbarism at close quarters, yet with a mystical eye on the City of God and a measured indulgence towards the vices of the earthly city. In Metz, Leone spoke as head of the Church and as a statesman; he paid due homage to the Church’s opposition to the war industry and rearmament plans, yet without failing to denounce pacifism as ‘naive irenism’, far removed from the call for surrender directed at the victim of aggression and from the culture of reversing responsibility in the Ukrainian war, not to mention the famous ‘courage of the white flag’. He lacked the heavenly complexity or theological subtlety of Benedict XVI when the latter—himself a pure-bred Augustinian—reconstructed the cultural and spiritual genesis of Europe in his address at the Collège des Bernardins (September 2008), but, on the other hand, he possessed the character of a man of balance who sought to redeem his Church from populist experimentation, reaffirming – as far as possible, in a world that has turned 180 degrees on the ethical foundations of its own culture of life and love – principles that are no longer shouted from the rooftops but remain non-negotiable. It is often said that style is the man himself, and the Leonine style is moderation, the spirit that reflects upon and allows things to mature—a quality which, after the prolonged stagnation of recent decades, faithful bishops, cardinals and priests evidently felt the need for.

Leone seemed at ease in a setting marked by the presence of economic and political Europe and its authorities, and by the memory of one of its founding fathers, the man from Lorraine who envisaged the coal and steel of a renewed Franco-German community as the building blocks for the Cathedral of the alliance – rediscovered and revitalised in the midst of war. It was striking—especially after the contentious and hostile estrangement between Francis’s Church and Europe and the West—to witness the fluid ritual of a shift in tone and content, conciliatory and effusive, in the papal rhetoric dedicated to this strange creation of governments, bureaucracies, banks, institutions, procedures and technocracies, the Union that did not adopt a Constitution and did not recognise the Christian roots of its civil origins. He smiled calmly at President Macron, the secular liberal whom his venerable predecessor would gladly have bitten.