Leo XIV The New Pope and Catholic Reform
ISBN 9781399430890
eISBN 9781399430906
ASIN B0FGTYT41D
When Pope Leo Xiv was elected soon a long list of forthcoming books was available. I picked a few I was interested in. This one however was not on that list. It was a few months before I heard about this and that was direct from the author. And I can state it is an excellent volume.
The description of the book states:
“When Robert Francis Prevost OSA appeared on the loggia of St. Peter's on 8th May 2025, he surprised the world.
The first North American pope is a quiet man few had heard of, following the legacy of one the most media savvy pontiffs in history. Yet with subtle gestures, Pope Leo has shown that he is a bridge-builder, a man willing to unite the factions in a deeply divided Church.
In this comprehensive book which joins biography with critical examination of the state of the Church, veteran journalist Christopher R. Altieri explores Prevost's life and work, from his early years in Chicago to his ministry in Peru, and how he came to be chosen as leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics.
Altieri provides insight into the politics of the 2025 conclave, alongside Pope Leo's choice of papal name, and the major challenges and deep-rooted problems of the Church that he now must run – and all at a time when the world is asking big questions about what it means to be human in a complex ethical world of AI and global conflict.
Through this Pope Leo emerges as a quiet man of true humility, with a track record as an efficient administrator and conciliatory figure, whose background in Canon Law might just offer him the skills needed to govern and reshape the modern Church.”
The chapters and sections in this volume are:
Preface and acknowledgments
Chapter 1: A radical choice
Profile of a pope
Pope Leo: What happened?
The Challenge of Reform
What reform looks like
“A muddy business”
Chapter 2: A restless heart
(Extra)ordinary beginnings
Cerca y personal: Augustinian, missionary, prior
Prior general, bishop, cardinal
The hand of providence
Chapter 3: “Peace be with all of you.”
Radically moderate
The power—and limits—of gestures and signs
Strange bedfellows: The College of Cardinals in brief
The conclave of May 2025 in context
Vicar of Christ: The man and the office
Chapter 4: An Augustinian pope
Power and order in the Augustinian mind
One commonwealth of all Christians: In illo uno unum
Journeying together
Peter’s Pence: Myth, facts, conjecture
Signs of the times
A threefold challenge for Pope Leo XIV
A long time coming
The bottom line
Chapter 8: Reform of justice
Leo XIV: Unfinished business
Justice in a fallen world
Practical challenges: Justice as closeness to victims
The requirements of natural justice
Natural justice and judicial independence
Reserve powers
The conciliarist controversy and its aftermath
Chapter 9: The nature and limits of papal governing power
Governing power as such
Justice in the ecclesiastical system
Twin challenges: transparency and judicial independence
Secrecy untenable
What could Pope Leo XIV do?
Preliminary indications: theory and practice
An investigative arm
A Matter for the Synod of Bishops?
Making the pallium mean something (again)
Conclusion: Drivers of crisis
Notes
I highlighted a number of passages while reading this volume. Some of them are:
“The election of Leo XIV, a son of Saint Augustine, is a momentous event in the life of the Church and of the world. This book is meant only to offer just a very little in the way of introduction to the man who has come into the papal office and to offer a view of the office into which Leo has come, perhaps under a new and different light. I have tried to write of the papacy itself, as much as I have endeavoured to write of Leo, and of the Catholic Church in the world of what is fast becoming the middle of the twenty-first century.”
“When it comes to Church reform, in other words, there is a practically achievable good that will always be closer to “good enough” than it may ever come to anything perfect or even very much better. That’s not to say that real reform is impossible, but it is to say a great deal about what successful reform looks like, and successful reform of Church structures and Church leadership culture has happened before.”
“Reform is a lengthy process. Reform is a cumbersome affair. Reform requires decisive action at crucial moments. Reform requires patience, diligence, and vigilance. Reform is always incomplete.”
“Two other images, both from ages past and both of late returned to vogue in some Catholic circles, may also help to bring the business into focus: Ecclesia militans and Ecclesia peregrinans, the “Church Militant” and the “Pilgrim Church”.”
“Catholics are right to expect that their leaders be protectors rather than thieves or worse, to demand that their rulers in the faith not put themselves in league with such or similar. Catholics have a right, therefore, to knowledge of their rulers’ conduct and character even and especially when the men who should be their shepherds are reckless, negligent, wicked, or stupid.”
“The life of Pope Leo XIV is equally deserving of such patient and careful treatment, which nevertheless cannot be the subject of this book either. As I have come to conceive of it, this book is in one respect biography-adjacent. It points toward the need for a full biography of Leo XIV. Its main usefulness, however, is in its capture of the sweep and scope of history—especially, though not exclusively, recent history—bringing into hard focus the real circumstances of the Church Leo XIV must govern and the world in which he must govern her.”
“The papacy is an impossible burden. That is why Catholics pray for the pope—whoever he is—and it is why no one in his right mind should ever desire to succeed St. Peter in his See of Rome.”
“Leo’s decision to take the risen Christ’s words of greeting to the disciples and make them his own first words to the Church, to Christians, and to the world, was therefore a choice for what one might call radical moderation. It was a bold choice also in keeping with the deep current of tradition.”
“In any case, unity and a return to convention and to regularity were things for which most cardinal electors were very keen. Unity, that is, understood not as uniformity but “a firm and profound communion in diversity, provided that full fidelity to the Gospel is maintained,” as the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Giovanni Battista Re, put it in his homily during the Mass for the election of the Roman pontiff—the Missa pro eligendo Romano pontifice—on 7 May 2025, the day the cardinals entered the conclave.
“Basically, everything good that one heard about Pope Francis was true. In his public and pastoral persona, Francis was power-fully charismatic, pastorally daring, relentlessly hard-working, intensely devoted to people. He was also autocratic, splenetic, unsystematic—not to say disorganized—officious, peremptory, mercurial. As I put it, roughly, in my obituary for Francis: He contained multitudes.”
“The conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV was not so much a referendum on his predecessor, as it was an acknowledgment of the good and the ill in the Francis pontificate. The cardinals were not looking for someone to continue with the agenda Francis had set out and pursued. They were not looking for someone who would repudiate that agenda. They were looking for someone with a fighting chance at bringing peace to the Church: order to her affairs and justice to her people. They chose Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost OSA.”
“Peace—pax in Latin—is not for an Augustinian the mere absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice. Peace, for Saint Augustine, is tranquillitas ordinis—the “tranquillity of order”—by which Saint Augustine means a right disposition of things, minds, and affairs both public and private. It is, in other words, a right ordering of thought, desire, action, activity, and circumstance.”
“It is not to say that Leo will return to policy pursued under Benedict. It is to say that one of the retrievals of the Leonine pontificate will be of specifically Augustinian sensibilities, which somehow also informed the teaching pontificate of Benedict XVI.”
“For the Church to be herself, her “best self ” we might say, she must have order in her own affairs, and good order will account for the frailties and indeed the brokenness of those who participate in it, as well as for their excellences. The Church, in other words, needs to have her own house in order if she is to be a credible, effective witness in the world. Rule of law is important for the Church, in other words, for the very straightforward reason that the Church is a society and one that must lead by example if she is to lead at all.”
“Whether Leo will show himself a hunter of wolves remains to be seen, but he has already given a good deal in the way of an explanation for his choice.”
“Pope Leo XIV is the first worldwide leader of the Catholic Church to have his own personal social media presence that predates his institutional leadership role at the global level. That is new, indeed. It offers both a key to understanding his public thinking about the challenges of communication and a reason to be interested in what he has to say, regardless of whether one is Catholic.”
“Whether Pope Leo XIV will be able to repair the institutions of the Church and foster new ones through a recovery of the Church’s own self-confidence as an expert in humanity deserving of the world’s attention, remains to be seen.”
“Pope Leo XIV has already demonstrated not only an intuitive appreciation of the need to foster privileged spaces for genuine human conversation, but also a real knack for fostering them. That, in short, is the easy part.”
“Three major issues facing the Church will require not only address from Pope Leo XIV in fairly short order—we shall see how they have already begun to receive it—but sustained and focused attention throughout his pontificate, both looking inward and looking outward: communications, curial culture, and synodality.”
“In terms of the existing apparatus, Pope Leo XIV will have to find a way to make economies. He will need to galvanize a demoralized workforce. He will need to identify leaders who think with the mind of the Church, understand the message focus of the reigning pontiff, see what a vast and irreplaceable treasure they have in the rank and file of workaday professionals staffing the communications apparatus, and are adept not only at the use of new technologies but comprehend their logic. Leo will need to put such leaders in place, find them the resources they need, and then get out of their way.”
“In framing the issue as he did, Pope Leo XIV once again showed himself to be a master of rhetoric. Leo at once reassured his closest collaborators and gave them a morale boost, while also gently but unequivocally acknowledging a major institutional confusion that had been getting worse for several years under his predecessor.”
“When Pope Leo XIV said, “The Curia is the institution that preserves and transmits the historical memory of a Church, of the ministry of its bishops,” he meant not only the Roman Curia, but those of “every particular Church, for the episcopal Curiae,” as well.”
“The basic problem is twofold: of power and its articulation. The pope is supreme ruler of the Church. Under God, the pope’s power is absolute. The pope’s power, however, is neither limitless nor total. Other bishops, priests, men and women religious, and the lay faithful all have duties according to their baptism and state of life in the Church, which means they have rights, which the pope is bound to respect. Prior to that, every human being is a person with natural obligations, hence natural rights, regardless of baptism or status in the Church, which no power on Earth may deny, truncate, or unduly burden or abridge.”
“The making of Leo XIV was not a perfectly uncomplicated matter, and his pontificate will have to wrestle with converging crises driven by an inveterate inability to address the cultural motors of abuse and cover-up, general governance, a loss of the Church’s own sense of history, and a leadership culture that is sclerotic if not necrotic, all at a time in which general confidence in political and social institutions is lower than it has been in generations and powerfully disruptive technological forces are at work in the world. The election of Pope Leo XIV did not thrill me as had the elections of his predecessors. That was not because I did not think highly of him. It was because I knew more and better than I had in 2005 and 2013, about how great and terrible is the work before him. Dulce bellum inexpertis.”
“I want Pope Leo XIV to do well. I wanted Francis to do well, and Benedict XVI before him. I recall wondering whether I had prayed enough for Benedict when he resigned, and decided I had not. I am sure I did not pray enough for Francis while he reigned, though I remember fondly and with gratitude how he encouraged popular devotion, and must credit his invitation to daily and attentive prayer of the rosary in October 2018 with rekindling Marian devotion in me, which had become rather lax and perfunctory. It strikes me as oddly fitting, that I have written a book about a pontificate at its beginning, and these are heady days for sure.”
“Perhaps the most powerful, and powerfully telling, lines of Pope Leo XIV’s address were those inviting his guests to craft “networks that give space to others more than to ourselves, where no ‘bubble’ can silence the voices of the weakest.” He described them further as “networks that liberate and save; networks that help us rediscover the beauty of looking into each other’s eyes; networks of truth.” It was bracing, stirring rhetoric. He began his speech: “In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, peace be with you!” Even reading it, I was transported to the loggia on that first evening.”
“The pontificate of Leo XIV is only just beginning. It will not be smooth sailing. There are too many crises facing the Church and society for it to be anything other than fraught with danger and adventure. There is no guarantee he will do well.”
I hope those quotes give you a feel for this excellent volume.
May things in this volume took me by surprise. It does an excellent job capturing the state of the church, and the burdens that must be top of mind for Pope Leo XIV. And most of them are concerns that I myself can relate to. This volume could almost be used as a playbook for the next few years, maybe even few decades. I respect the way Christopher dealt with the financial scandals. I appreciate his handling of the Rupnik Affair and what should be the next steps. But what I loved most was the concept of a Vatican equivalent to the NCIS. An independent body, capable of investigation, both in Rome and then locally, and I love the proposed transparency. I also feel I did not pray enough for either of the previous pontiff’s but am trying to remedy that by praying for Pope Leo a few times a day.
Drawing upon his years of reporting Altieri has written a critically important volume. A book about the state of the church today, and how Pope Leo’s past experience can serve the church and bring about change and repairs. The example he begins the book with about repairing a ship at sea kept coming to mind as I read the volume and was returned to in that final quite above, whit which the book concluded.
A great book I can easily recommend for any Catholic, or anyone interested in the workings of the church and the work set out before Pope Leo XIV.
Note: This book is part of a series of reviews: 2025 Catholic Reading Plan!
Books about Pope Leo XIV:
LEO XIV: Portrait of the First American Pope - Matthew Bunson
Pope Leo XIV Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy - Christopher White
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Books By Pope Leo XVI:
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Related Posts:
Rerum Novarum: Encyclical Letter Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour - Pope Leo XIII - CTS Books
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Books by Christopher R. Altieri:
Into the Storm: Chronicle of a Year in Crisis
The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood
…
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