Pope Leo XIV has written Easter greetings to the College of Cardinals, with a little bit of business included in the prayerful well-wishing and gratitude expressed for their work during a consistory meeting in early January of this year.
It does not take too much careful parsing of the letter, dated April 12 and sent from the Vatican, to see how the pontiff is carefully and deliberately steering the cardinals ahead of their next consistory at the end of June.
“In my concluding remarks in January,” Leo wrote, “I already referred to some elements regarding synodality that emerged from the groups.”
“Now,” he wrote in the very next sentence, “I wish to focus in particular on what emerged from the groups regarding Evangelii gaudium, especially concerning mission and the transmission of the faith.”
Leo, in short, is gently but unmistakably focusing the cardinals’ attentions away from synodality, a buzzword of the Francis pontificate that absorbed enormous resources but never really received a practical articulation or even a working definition.
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At the same time, Leo is concentrating the cardinals’ energies on the first major piece of writing, the post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, widely considered the best piece of writing come from Francis during his dozen-year whirlwind pontificate.
The move to focus on Francis’s seminal exhortation is particularly telling in light of the fact that the cardinals chose synodality and Evangelii gaudium from among the four topics of discussion Leo offered them ahead of the January gathering.
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“Your contributions,” Leo wrote in his April 12 letter, “make it clear that this exhortation continues to be a significant point of reference.”
Leo told the cardinals how, in their discussions during the January gathering, they emphasized many ways in which the exhortation “challenges the Church at every level.”
On the personal level, Leo says, Evangelii gaudium “calls every baptized person to renew their encounter with Christ, moving from a faith merely received to a faith truly lived and experienced.”
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The exhortation calls communities to “shift from a pastoral approach of maintenance to one of mission,” requiring them “to be living agents of the proclamation” of the Gospel. Leo even gets into specifics on the point: Noting the need to foster “welcoming communities that use accessible language, attentive to the quality of relationships, and [are] capable of offering places for listening, accompaniment and healing,” all things that were motifs of his predecessor’s pastoral vision.
“At the diocesan level,” Leo wrote, “the responsibility of Pastors to resolutely support missionary boldness emerges clearly, ensuring that such boldness is not weighed down or stifled by organizational excesses, but is guided by a discernment that helps us to recognize what is essential.”
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“From all this flows a profoundly unified understanding of mission,” the pontiff wrote, one he said was centered on Christ and on the fearlessly joyful proclamation of the Good News of his resurrection.
“It is born of an encounter with Christ that is capable of transforming lives and spreading through attraction rather than conquest,” Leo wrote, “an integral mission, holding in balance explicit proclamation, witness, commitment and dialogue, and yielding neither to the temptation of proselytism nor to a merely institutional mentality of preservation or expansion.”
If there had been any concern or even any mere uncertainty within the college over the direction of the Church under the new pontiff, the letter dispels it.
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Pope Leo’s letter to the cardinals is at once disarming and reassuring to parties across the spectrum of opinion in the college, focusing attention away from a nebulous and contentious holdover of the Francis era – synodality – while incorporating the substance of the vision from which his predecessor’s pontificate drew its undeniable pastoral enthusiasm.
“Even when the Church finds herself in a minority,” Leo wrote, “she is called to live with confident courage, as a small flock bringing hope to all, mindful that the aim of mission is not its own survival, but the communication of the love with which God loves the world.”
The letter, in short, is a rhetorical masterstroke, executed by a writer in perfect control of his message.
Readers of this scribbler’s Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform may well recall how people who met the man we now call Leo XIV when he was head of the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome were frequently amazed at cardinal-prefect’s ability.
Then-cardinal Prevost “impressed his staff with his ability to listen with careful attention and to keep meetings properly focused,” I noted, “sometimes despite the best efforts of other participants,” and often enough “without the meandering and loquacious parties ever becoming the wiser.”
Here he is, as Pope Leo XIV, doing it again.
Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri
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