A LESS PAPAL-CENTRIC CHURCH? POPE LEO’S APPROACH? NOT A BAD THING!

 I don’t know who Father Clinton Sensat is, but he certainly makes good sense! I saw this on a shared facebook page:

You know what I like the most about Pope Leo XIV?

He won't indulge our addiction to papal headlines. 

Some months ago I pointed to what I felt (and feel) is a real problem in the Church. That problem is a hyper-fixation on the papacy. A number of commenters didn't like that, but I still stand by it. People ignore their pastors, their bishops, their neighbors, and focus on the pope as the only true or authentic indicator of what it means to be Catholic. 

I said then, and I repeat now, that this is not the Church Jesus Christ established. The pope is the successor of Peter, yes, and the visible head of the Church on earth, yes, but that doesn't flatten everyone else in the Church into insignificance. 

And yet, for decades now, getting worse every year, and due to a conglomeration of causes, people only pay attention to the pope. Other leaders in the Church only momentarily grab our attention when a) they're on our ideological side and do something we consider "courageous" or b) they do something scandalous. 

Scripture can indicate why this is a problem - 

Peter was the head of the Apostles and the first pope. What if the New Testament therefore ignored Paul or John or Matthew or Thomas or Mary Magdalene or Stephen? How unbearably cheapened would our picture of the early disciples be if the New Testament had the same obsession as the news? Can you imagine a Bible that fixated on Peter the way the internet fixates on the pope?

It's not healthy. 

Enter Leo XIV. 

He has cut off our supply. People still scramble to elevate the most normal, humdrum parts of his life into epic news, but it doesn't get much traction. He hasn't released his first encyclical yet. He hasn't had a major apostolic journey. He hasn't made huge changes to the Curia. We're getting twitchy for headlines, and so we're reduced to the following:

- he's going to live with some Augustinians. It's pretty standard for a pope to have a group of priests live with him, but to read the forced headlines you'd think Leo had invented religious life. 

- he met with Cardinal Burke. Exultation! He met with James Martin. Dismay! Note that we don't really know what was said at these meetings - he just met with people, as part of his daily agenda, and the internet tried to spin that into signs in the heavens and portents of things to come. 

He's a quiet man, our pope, except when it comes to two things: Jesus Christ and the cause of peace. He hasn't said, so I don't want to speculate too far, but I suspect his quiet is trying to teach us something about the papacy. 

After all, he saw all those papal headlines of the past too. If he seems so intent on not making them, perhaps that in itself is the lesson.

Whatever the case may be, my point is this: honor Peter. 

But don’t neglect Paul and John and Stephen and Mary Magdalene. 

The Church is bigger than the pope, and crucial things happen in places other than the Vatican. Pray God that Leo XIV has a long reign, a reign long enough for us to go through withdrawals and into recovery. 

Then we can focus on the good of the Church at home, and not be so fixated on the Church in Rome.