By LEONARDO BOFF*

From Peru to the Vatican, the journey of Pope Leo XIV — and the impossible mission of de-Westernizing a Church that insists on wearing the clothes of the Roman Empire

1.

I confess that I was surprised by the appointment of the North-American-Peruvian Cardinal Robert Prevost to the supreme pontificate of the Church. This was due to my ignorance. Later, when I found out more, I saw youtubes and his speeches among the people, standing in the middle of a flooded Peruvian city and his special care for the indigenous people (the majority of Peruvians) made me realize that he really can be the guarantee of the continuity of Pope Francis' legacy.

He will not have the charisma of the last Pope, but he will be himself, more reserved and shy, but very consistent with his social positions, including criticism of President Donald Trump and his vice president. It is not without reason that Pope Francis called him from his diocese of the poor in Peru and summoned him to an important role in the Vatican administration.

Leo XIV lived much of his life outside the United States, for many years as a missionary and then as a bishop in Peru, where he certainly gained extensive experience of another culture and the poor social situation of the majority of the population. He explicitly confessed that he identified with those people to the point of becoming a naturalized Peruvian.

His first speech to the public went against my initial expectations. It was a pious speech, made for the Church’s internal life. The word “poor” never appeared, much less liberation, threats to life and the ecological outcry. The strong theme was peace, especially “unarmed and disarming,” a gentle criticism of what is happening today in dramatic ways, such as the war in Ukraine and the open genocide of thousands of innocent children and civilians in the Gaza Strip. It would seem that all of this was not on the new Pope’s conscience. But I believe that all of this will soon return, since such tragedies were so strong in the speeches of Pope Francis, his great friend, that they must still resonate in the new Pope’s ears.

As a Jesuit, Pope Francis had a rare sense of politics and the exercise of power, through his famous “discernment of the spirit,” a central category of Ignatian spirituality. My assumption is that he saw Cardinal Robert Prevost as a possible successor. He did not belong to the old and already decadent European Christianity; he came from the Great South, with pastoral and theological experience that had matured on the periphery of the Church, in this case in Peru, where liberation theology was born and developed with Gustavo Gutiérrez.

Surely, with his gentle manner and his nature of listening and dialogue, he will carry forward the challenges taken on and the innovations faced by Pope Francis, which is not the case here.

2.

But there will be other challenges, in my view, that have never been taken seriously by the interventions of previous popes: how to de-Westernize and de-patriarchalize the Catholic Church in the face of the new phase of humanity. This is characterized by the globalization of humanity (not only in the economic sense, now disturbed by Donald Trump) that is in fact occurring at an increasingly rapid pace in political, social, technological, philosophical and spiritual terms. In this accelerated process, the Catholic Church, in its institutionality and in the way it has been structured hierarchically, appears to be a creation of the West. This is undeniable.

Behind all this is classical Roman law, the power of the emperors with their symbols, rites and form of exercising power centralized in a supreme authority, the Pope, “with ordinary, maximum, full, immediate and universal power” (canon 331), attributes that, in truth, belong only to God. Added to this is his infallibility in matters of faith and morals. One could not go any further. Pope Francis consciously moved away from this paradigm and began to inaugurate another model of a simple and poor Church that goes out into the world.

This has nothing to do with the historical Jesus, poor, preacher of an absolute dream, the Kingdom of God and severe critic of all power. But that is what happened: with the erosion of the Roman Empire, Christians, who became a Church, with a high sense of morality, took on the reorganization of the Roman Empire that lasted for centuries. But this is a creation of Western culture.

The original message of Jesus, his gospel, do not exhaust yourself or identify with this type of incarnation, because Jesus' message is one of total openness to God as Abba (dear Father), unlimited mercy, unconditional love even for enemies, compassion for those who have fallen on the roads of life and life as service to others. The current Pope Leo XIV will not be immune to this challenge. We want to see and support his courage and strength to face the traditionalists and take steps in this direction.

3.

A great, immense challenge for any Pope is to relativize this way of organizing Christianity so that it can gain new faces in the various human cultures. Pope Francis has taken great strides in this direction. The current new Pope hinted at this dialogue in his inaugural address. Until we move firmly towards this de-Westernization, for many countries Christianity will always be a thing of the West. It was an accomplice in the colonization of Africa, the Americas and Asia and is still seen as such by the minds of the countries that were colonized.

Another challenge, no less significant, is the depatriarchalization of the Church. This has already been mentioned above. The Church is led by only men, and they are celibate and ordained in the sacrament of Holy Orders (priest to Pope). The patriarchal factor is visible in the denial of women to the sacrament of Holy Orders. They make up by far the majority of the faithful and are the mothers and sisters of the other half, of the men of the Church and of humanity. This sexist exclusion harms the ecclesial body and calls into question the universality of the Church. As long as women are not given the opportunity, as has happened in almost all churches, to access the priesthood, the Church shows its deep-rooted patriarchy and its mark of a West that is increasingly an Accident in universal history.

In addition, the mandatory maintenance of celibacy (made into law) makes the patriarchal character even more radical and favors the anti-feminism that is noted in strata of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Since it is only a human and historical law and not divine, there is nothing to prevent it from being abolished and optional celibacy being permitted.

These and many other challenges will have to be faced by the new Pope, as the evangelical sense of participation (synodality) and equality in dignity and rights of all human beings, men and women, grows more and more in the consciousness of the faithful. Why should it be any different in the Catholic Church?

These reflections are intended to be a permanent challenge to be faced by those who have been chosen for the highest service of animating the faith and guiding the paths of the Christian community, as the figure of the Pope. The time will come when the force of these changes will become so demanding that they will occur. Then it will be a new springtime of the Church, which will become all the more universal the more it takes on universal questions and makes its contribution to humanizing responses.

*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Ecclesiogenesis: the reinvention of the Church (All time lap record). [https://amzn.to/435ZQg4]

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