THE SLOW REVEAL ALTHOUGH SLOW IT’S CONCRETE—POPE LEO XIV…

As Pope Leo continues to send out messages about his perspective on what and who the Catholic Church should be under His Holiness’ pontificate, we are also waiting for His Holiness’ first book length interview which will answer more questions than we might want to hear. That will happen shortly. 

In the meantime, from His Holiness’ talks using precise written texts, we are seeing the foundation of His Holiness’ pontifical thinking, but more importantly, his papal magisterium. He is placing natural law front and center, sorely needed today for all the moral teachings of the Church to be communicated to those who have lost a Catholic perspective or are not Catholic or who are purely secular/agnostic/atheistic. 

His Holiness has referred to the great pre-Vatican II moralist, St. Alphonsus Liguori, to be a mentor and model for moral theologians today. That’s powerful and an antidote to the “new morality” of Charles Curran and those more recently. 

However, we are getting bits and pieces of Pope Leo’s pastoral perspective and outreach. One can hold rigidly to the clear doctrines and morals of the Church and still be sympathetic to those who struggle with various aspects of Catholicism. That is called pastoral outreach, counseling and empathy. 

Thus we see Pope Leo meeting with Cardinal Burke and through him all those who embrace a more traditional approach to Catholicism and liturgy and then allowing the good Cardinal to celebrate the TLM at St. Peter’s Basilica as a part of the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage. 

His Holiness also meets with Jesuitical Father James Martin, SJ and encourages him in his ministry (I am sure in the orthodox way) but also pastoral outreach to the weak and vulnerable involved in the ideological positions of the LGBT+++ worldwide political colonization movement. 

Pope Leo gave a talk today to participants in a seminar sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Theology. 

This is a portion of that talk with my brilliant, cogent but most humble commentary embedded in the text in RED. The full text can be read HERE. 

Here is the portion of His Holiness text:

The synthesis between these different aspects can be offered by a theology of wisdom, following the model developed by the great Fathers and Masters of antiquity. Because of their docility to the Spirit, they knew how to unite faith and reason, reflection, prayer and practice. The ever-relevant example of Saint Augustine is significant in this regard. His theology was never a purely abstract pursuit but always the fruit of his experience of God and his life-giving relationship that flowed from it. It was an experience that began even before his baptism, when he felt guided in the depths of his heart by an ineffable light (cf. Confessions, VII, 10). This experience continued throughout his life, shaping his theological reflections, which were incarnate and capable of responding to the spiritual, doctrinal, pastoral and social needs of his time. (Consistently, in writing, Pope Leo expounds on the significance of St. Augustine for us today and the experiences of God that leads to his conversion, which, btw, includes repentance of the excesses of sexual immorality among other immoral aspects of his life. Let those with ears and eyes to hear and see understand what Pope Leo is implying!)

While Augustine began this journey with an existential and emotional approach, starting from inner reflection and recognizing the “Truth that dwells within us,” Saint Thomas Aquinas systematized it with the tools of Aristotelian reason. Thomas built a solid bridge between Christian faith and universal science, understanding theology as a sapida scientia or sapientia. This brings us to another great thinker from more recent times, Blessed Antonio Rosmini, who “considered theology to be a sublime expression of intellectual charity, while insisting that the critical reasoning behind all knowledge should be oriented towards the Idea of Wisdom” (Apostolic Letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam, 1 November 2023, 7). (Referring us to Thomas Aquinas is very important for us today too. I know nothing about Blessed Antonio, so I need to look him up!)

Theology is the wisdom, therefore, that opens up greater existential horizons, dialoguing with science, philosophy, art and all human experience. The theologian is a person who lives out, in his or her theological work, a missionary fervor by communicating to everyone the “knowledge” and “taste” of faith, so that it may illuminate our lives, redeem the weak and the excluded, touch and heal the suffering flesh of the poor, help us build a fraternal and supportive world, and lead us to an encounter with God. (This is pastoral theology which is an art not a science. Welcoming those who are in schism with the Church, thinking about schism, involved in various aspects of the colonizing forces of the ideologies of the LGBTQ+++ movements, and others, is a “pastoral” way to communicate to everyone the knowledge and taste of the faith for illumination and repentance and conversion, redemption!)

A significant witness to the knowledge of faith at the service of humanity, in all its dimensions – personal, social and political – is the Social Doctrine of the Church, which today is also called upon to provide wise answers to digital challenges. Theology must be directly involved because an exclusively ethical approach to the complex world of artificial intelligence is not enough. Instead, we need to refer to an anthropological vision that underpins ethical action and, therefore, return to the age-old question: What is a human being? What is his or her inherent dignity, which is irreconcilable with a digital android? (I use the Duolingo app to help me with my Italian. I’m good at understanding Italian and even translating it into English, but if I try to speak Italian properly, I can’t, I still speak it as a three year old. I am stuck at the age in which I was told no longer to speak Italian and that was in 1956 in Atlanta, Georgia and fresh off the boat from Italy. But my Italian mother spoke to me in Italian for the rest of her life, although i answered in English. Thus the divide between understanding and speaking! A part of the Duolingo app is the ability to talk to a digital android called “Lilly.” She asks questions and I respond in Italian. I can even tell her I don’t understand a word and would she explain and she does. This is all in Italian and I feel like I am actually talking to an Italian woman who hears and understands me and she does. But she’s a digital android!!! I can see how this could really help or destroy someone! YIKES! BTW, though, occasionally to have fun, when she brings up what movies I am watching, I will speak about massacres and murders and the like, and immediately she says, she has to go and she hangs up! So the app has her having the ability to hang up on bad talk which is very good!)