AS POPE LEO XIV CLOSES THE HOLY DOOR ON TUESDAY, JANUARY 6TH, THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY, SO TOO DOES POPE LEO CLOSE THE DOOR ON POPE FRANCIS’ PAPACY AND POPE LEO XIV BEGINS HIS AGENDA AND PAPACY…

Crux has a good commentary on Pope Leo beginning his “real” papacy beginning after His Holiness closes the Holy Door and the Holy Year that Pope Francis opened. Symbolically, it represents the closing of Pope Francis’ papacy and the beginning of Pope Leo’s papacy and its agenda.

Here are some money bytes from the Crux commentary which you can read in full HERE:

Leo’s pontificate not of rupture but of adjustment..” “Not a pontificate of restoration,” but “a pontificate of renewal,” albeit one within the traditions of the office and of the Church for which the office is given.

Folks who were hoping for swift abandonment and reversal of some of Francis’s less popular measures were bound to be disappointed – and they have been, largely – but there is a significant sense in which the folks hoping for perfect continuity with Francis – a Francis II in everything but name – were always going to have the harder time of it (and while still in denial about that, they are sensing that Pope Leo XIV is Pope Leo XIV, not Pope Francis II)…

Francis was an anomaly, a disruptive force and a cyclonic presence in the papal office, who unleashed enormous energies but did not harness or channel them. In his own words (or those of his closest advisors), Francis described his way as “start[ing] processes” rather than “dominating spaces” because “time is greater than space.”

“Reform on the go,” …described Francis’s approach to reshaping the Vatican and the Church, while Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro called Francis’s leadership “open and incomplete.”

The great paradox of the Francis era was that Francis eschewed the trappings of papal reign while nakedly wielding the raw power of the office, and so in the name of a “healthy decentralization” that concentrated power in the person of the pontiff, who then discharged it.

Francis certainly shook things up in the Vatican and in the Church – that it was past time for a shakeup was one of the very few things on which people across the spectrum of opinion in the Church agreed when Francis was elected – but after a dozen years of Francis’s whirlwind leadership, the structural and cultural issues driving the dysfunction he inherited were – are – still present.

The work of his successor – whoever he would be – was always going to be the work of consolidation, ordering. It was always going to be a work of “absorption” to use Gagliarducci’s term, and you need an institutionalist for that.

In Leo XIV, we have a fellow who is an institutionalist by character and temperament, whose biography suggests he is powerfully and perhaps uniquely suited to the task of the present moment.

And Silere non possum has this commentary which you can read in full HERE:

Liturgy as a believed act

This is what Leo XIV, with his Augustinian spirituality, is bringing into the Church. In just a few months he has already carried out important reforms, cancelling ideological choices made in the past on the economic and financial level, while also making significant appointments, transfers, resuming certain customs and abandoning others. “The Pope is taking stock,” remarked a close clerical friend of his who serves in the Roman Curia. Among the most evident elements of these first months is the way Leo XIV celebrates Holy Mass. These have been particular years for all of Christianity. Francis had begun not to celebrate Holy Mass anymore, and not for reasons of health. When he stopped celebrating he was more than well. At times he concelebrated, at times he presided, at times he assisted. It was all a chaos that was difficult to understand. And even when he did celebrate, nothing of that mystery came across.

The sung celebration, the use of Latin, the choice of beautiful vestments – far removed both from ostentation and from that pauperism which at times became costly and ideological – return the liturgy to its proper register: the action of the Church that makes visible the mystery it celebrates. “Beauty is not a superfluous ornament, but a path that leads to the Mystery,” the Pope recalled in a recent homily.

Within the same horizon lies the resumption of the dalmatic under the chasuble, in accordance with liturgical norms. It is not a stylistic detail: it is a sign that removes the celebrant from the logic of personal display and instead points to the fullness of sacred order entrusted to him by the Church, within a liturgy that does not belong to the one who presides, but to the People of God.