A Leo on Leo

          Last Monday was the feast of St. Leo the Great.  He was Pope Leo I, who reigned from A.D. 440-461.  He was noted for fighting heresies, theological profundity (he’s counted as a doctor of the Church and one of only three officially called “the Great”), and charitable and administrative leadership.

          A key theme of Leo I’s pontificate was his acute sense of being the “successor of Peter,” of the unity that should bring.  That unity recognizes diversity but brings it together.  In Sermon Four on the Anniversary of His Episcopal Ordination, Leo cites 1 Pt 2:9 as to the People of God being a royal priesthood.  But he also clearly has in mind the Pauline image of the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ (I Cor 12:12-27)  when Leo says that “None of us is separated from the other by function to the point that the humblest member of the body is not united to the head.” Indeed, Leo calls the Church a “classless society” in “the unity of faith and baptism.”  That passage should not however, be interpreted as denying or diluting the difference in essence and not just degree between the priesthood of the faithful and the ordained priesthood (see Lumen gentium, 10 - https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html ).   What first unites us, however, is “the unity of faith and baptism” in Christ Jesus.  Leo is explicit: “as the Apostle says, we are all one in Christ.”

          I cite Leo I to comment on Leo XIV.  The new pope has chosen as his episcopal motto a passage from St. Augustine: “In Illo uno unum” (In the One, we are one).  His choice reflects his awareness of the papacy as the visible sign of ecclesial unity, in the person of Christ whose vicar the Pope is.  Our fundamental unity is in Christ, our Head.  But as the inscription encircling the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica should remind the Pope, he is Peter who is charged to “confirm the faith of his brothers” (Lk 22:32). 

          Catholic theology teaches that the Church is marked by four notes—unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity (“one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”)—and the first is unity.  It is what Our Lord prayed for at the Last Supper (Jn 17).  Let us today pray for that unity and for our new Holy Father, our new Leo, to be the lion who builds that unity.