What is a Christian Attitude Toward a New Pope?
God uses every Pope for His Providence, whether he is good or evil.
Now that our new Holy Father has finished his first day as our father, let us take a step back from all the news, rumours and speculations, and ground our hearts in the fundamental Catholic attitude toward a new Holy Father.
I know this is fundamental for my own spiritual life, because I must pay close attention to Pope Leo for the duration of his pontificate, as a necessity for my job. No Catholic needs to pay close attention to him (a fact we will discuss in due course), but I know that I must. Working as an amateur intellectual writer in the public sphere, the person of the Pope is the subject of an intense spiritual battle I have tried my best to fight (with many failures), since I began writing in 2019.
But enough about me, let’s turn to the Doctor of the Church for the Twentieth Century for guidance here. Dietrich von Hildebrand says something vital for the spiritual life in general, and a Christian attitude toward a new Pope in particular.
He says that reverence is the mother of all virtues.
Reverence is the attitude that can be designated as the mother of all moral life, for in it man first takes a position toward the world that opens his spiritual eyes and enables him to grasp values…[1]
The idea is that without this fundamental reverence toward the entire world and the God Who created it, we suffer from blindness. We will be ignorant of what reality is. No man can experience and know reality itself (or Truth Himself) without this fundamental attitude.
The man possessing reverence approaches the world in a completely different way [than the irreverent man who is concupiscent and blind to values]. He is free from this egospasm, from pride and concupiscence. He does not fill the world with his own ego, but leaves to being the place that it needs in order to unfold itself. He understands the dignity and nobility of being as such, the value which it already possesses in its opposition to mere nothingness. Thus there is a value inherent in every stone, in a drop of water, and a blade of grass, precisely as being, as an entity that possesses its own being, which is such and not otherwise. In contradistinction to a fantasy or a sheer semblance, it is something independent to the person considering it, it is something withdrawn from its arbitrary will. Hence, each of these things has the quite general value of existence.… Confronted with being, the reverent man remains silent in order to give it an opportunity to speak.[2]
When we encounter a new thing, or a new person, we must “remain silent” in order to give the person a chance to speak and act and reveal himself. Only with this reverence can we know this person.
And this reverence, which is critical for understanding and knowing reality itself, begins with a humble movement of the heart:
… This responsive attitude to the value of being is provided by the disposition to recognize something superior to one’s arbitrary pleasure and will, and to be ready to subordinate and abandoned oneself. It enables the spiritual eye to see the deeper nature of every being. It leaves to being the possibility of unveiling its essence, and makes a man capable of grasping values. To whom will the sublime beauty of a sunset or a Ninth Symphony of Beethoven reveal itself, but to him who approaches it reverently and unlocks his heart to it?[3]
We must open our heart to a thing or person, in order to know it truly. Otherwise we are blind.
(These passages already convict me of irreverence toward the Holy Father. I deeply struggle with my conscience in these times to truly be a Christian not in name only but in word and truth. My little children, let us not love in word, nor in tongue, but in deed, and in truth [I Jn. iii. 18].)
Religious Questions and Blindness
I’ve found this idea of reverence and reality to be absolutely true in my own spiritual life and religious journey. When I was Protestant, then Eastern Orthodox, I found that there were many lies spoken against the true Church, the Catholic Church.
But these lies were based on a aspects of the truth.
The Devil uses an aspect of reality in order to tell his lies.
As a result I was lost outside the Ark of Salvation and I was convinced I was correct, because 1.) the lies had some aspect of the truth to them and 2.) my own pride desired these lies so that I could remain “in power over reality.”
Hildebrand is getting at the second, more crucial aspect of finding the truth. If we have reverence, we can penetrate past the lies mixed with truth to the whole reality of a thing or person.
Karol Wojtyła has a fascinating obiter dictum in his magnum opus, Person and Act, in which he states that this “kernel of truth” (as we say in the States) which the devil uses, warps our brains:
An aspect can neither replace the whole nor displace it from our field of vision. If that took place, we would deal with the absolutization of an aspect, which is always an error in the cognition of a complex reality.[4]
Reality, especially a single human person, is a complex reality. When we find one aspect of a person which is a true aspect, we can then absolutize this aspect, which then causes us to make an error in our knowledge of a person. I certainly did that with the Catholic Church, which allowed me to sinfully rationalize my membership in Eastern Orthodoxy, not Catholicism. But I did this most of all with aspects of a person – the Pope. I “absolutized” the bad aspects of many Popes, which made me harden my heart against the Papacy in general.
If we had reverence, we would unlock our hearts to the reality of a person, and allow all of his or her heart to unfold to us, in all its complex reality.
By some unmerited grace of God’s mercy, I began to see that every single Pope – and thus a fortiori, the Papacy itself – is a very complex reality, every time a new Pope has a pontificate. Even Pope Francis had many positive aspects. God uses every Pope for His Providence whether he is good or evil.
The Christian Attitude toward a New Holy Father
And so, this wisdom from Hildebrand and Wojtyła help us to try to form a real Christian attitude toward any new Holy Father. This is especially true for most of us who are not from Peru and do not know him personally. By this time all of you have heard all sorts of things about Pope Leo XIV, good and bad. Is he a “mixed bag”?
(Well, most of us are a “mixed bag” too, let’s admit that first.)
We must get to know our Holy Father with reverence, so that the whole reality of who he is will truly unfold itself to us. Let us ask Our Lady, Queen of Humility, to obtain for us this precious grace of reverence to unlock our hearts to our Holy Father, and keep far away from us the devil’s lies, which are designed to harden our hearts against him.
If he is a good Pope, we will love him.
If he is a bad Pope, we will love him.
If he is a mixture of good and evil, we will love him.
On this day I ask you to pray for me, dear reader, so that I can have this precious grace from above, for my own heart is burdened with my task: to publicly persuade all men to be Catholic and remain Catholic, for the salvation of our souls and life eternal.
Therefore let us, with all our forefathers, adhere to Rome and the Roman Pontiff with filial reverence.
I love what Kennedy Hall pointed out yesterday: Pope Leo was elected on the pre-55 feast of the Apparition of St. Michael. And his namesake predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, wrote the great prayer to St. Michael for the battle against the devil in our time. Therefore, let us see reverently with the eyes of Faith, that whatever comes next, Our Father in Heaven governs all things through the King of Kings, Jesus Christ, and through His Vicar, the Pope of Rome – whether the Pope likes it or not.
With sincere love in His Majesty Jesus Christ and His Sacred Heart,
Timothy
[1] Dietrich von Hildebrand, Art of Living (Hildebrand Project, 2017), 3. Emphasis his.
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3] Ibid., 6.
[4] Karol Wojtyła, Person and Act, trans. Grzegorz Ignatik (CUA Press, 2023), 124. My emphasis.
Pray for the best. But never popesplain.