VATICAN CITY — The day after Pope Leo XIV emerged from the conclave as the first American pontiff in history, he headed back into the Sistine Chapel to celebrate the liturgy with the cardinals who elected him.
Leo held his first Mass as pope on Friday, in which he delivered a homily reflecting on Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church, and his newly confirmed role as the bishop of Rome.
His tone was doctrinal and sincere yet sober about the spiritual malaise washing over the modern world. The core purpose was clear: a rallying cry to evangelize a world that has forgotten Christianity.
‘VIVA IL PAPA!’ CATHOLICS CELEBRATE NEW POPE
“Today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure,” the pontiff told the cardinals. “These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised, or at best tolerated and pitied.”
“Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed,” he continued. “A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family, and so many other wounds that afflict our society.”
The liturgical reading for the Mass came from St. Matthew’s account of Jesus asking St. Peter who he believes him to be. In the passage, Peter affirms his belief that Jesus is the “Christ” and “Son of the Living God.”
The pope preached that this interaction reveals simultaneously the free grace and the call to pursue holiness given to mankind by God, and ultimately, the mission of the Catholic Church.
“Peter, in his response, understands both of these things: the gift of God and the path to follow
in order to allow himself to be changed by that gift. They are two inseparable aspects of salvation
entrusted to the church to be proclaimed for the good of the human race,” Leo said.
He continued, “Indeed, they are entrusted to us, who were chosen by him before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs, reborn in the waters of baptism, and, surpassing our limitations and with no merit of our own, brought here and sent forth from here, so that the gospel might be proclaimed to every creature.”
It was a Christocentric and theologically dense first homily for the pontiff, likely to be applauded for its immediate and sustained call to evangelization.
Even when the pontiff eventually addressed the topic that the entire media circus outside in the square was waiting for, his unlikely rise to the Holy See as the first American pontiff, he kept the focus on his role within the greater church.
“In a particular way, God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles,
and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator for the sake of the entire mystical body of the church,” he told the cardinals. “He has done so in order that she may be ever more fully a city set on a hill, an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world.”
He added, “And this, not so much through the magnificence of her structures or the grandeur of her buildings, like the monuments among which we find ourselves, but rather through the holiness of her members. For we are the people whom God has chosen as his own, so that we may declare the wonderful deeds of Him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
THE UNTHINKABLE: AN AMERICAN POPE
The Mass is only the first glimpse of Leo’s spirituality and priorities. Compared to other cardinals who entered the conclave, the former Chicago bishop is something of a theological wildcard.
Like the Catholic Church itself, the pontiff’s few known opinions are impossible to graph on the temporal left-right spectrum.
An American who spent many years doing missionary work in Peru, the new “Papa Americano” bucked common wisdom that said a cleric from the world’s superpower could never take the Holy See.
The world watches and waits to see what the Chicagoan Yankee in St. Peter’s Court will do.
