For Wilshire Baptist Church
Sometime around noon, central daylight savings time on May 8, a man named Robert Francis Prevost became Leo XIV. The Catholic Church has a new pope. So does the entire world – and the United States too.
I’m Baptist and not Catholic so I can’t speak to everything it means to members of the Catholic church, but I do have some thoughts about it. My late wife Debra was a devout Catholic and I waded in those waters for 25 years although I never took the full plunge. Still, I learned a lot about the church and its ways and came to respect it and admire it with both my head and my heart. For one thing, they still took faith and religious practice seriously at a time when many Christian denominations were giving in to popular culture and trends.
And I saw the way Catholics looked up to their pope – not as some sort of earthly deity but as a spiritual leader and servant. In 1987 when Pope John Paul II came to the United States, I boarded a bus with Debra’s family and was one of the 350,000 standing in a field near San Antonio for an outdoor mass. I doubt I was the only non-Catholic in that sea of humanity, and I was not drawn so much by the man but by the rare opportunity to be “the church” and experience “the mystery of faith” in the biggest way possible.
I also caught on to the fact that Catholics are as diverse as Baptists with conservatives, liberals, traditionalists and progressives all under the same roof. For that reason, I’ve found myself more than once in a Baptist Sunday school class cautioning others about painting Catholics with a broad brush dipped in stereotypical colors. After all, I knew firsthand a Catholic who married a Baptist – an act that is still frowned upon in some Catholic circles.
Time will tell where the new pope stands on some of the most contentious spiritual, theological and public issues of our day and who in the Catholic church will follow him to the letter and who will not. But, it hasn’t taken any time at all for religious-oriented media and church scholars to dive into his playbook like that of a new coach and begin breaking down his strengths and weaknesses, tactics and systems. We already saw from the balcony he’s not afraid to throw the Hail Mary.
As for the world, while only 1.4 billion people – just 17.7% of Earth’s population – are Catholic, the pope in many ways belongs to us all. He is a spiritual leader who often is looked to for prophetic insight into the plight of the human race and our relationship to our creator and each other. While we non-Catholics won’t hang on his every word for spiritual direction, we still might glean spiritual food for thought from him as we do from other noted Catholic theologians and thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr.
The biggest surprise is that the new Pope is the first from America, or more precisely, the United States. Many speculated that would never happen because having a pope from the wealthy, aggressive American melting pot would be a dangerous amassing of power. In the same way, it was thought we should never have a Catholic president until John F. Kennedy broke through that wall, and now we’ve had two with neither the church nor the republic particularly impacted by it.
Like the talking heads on TV that were gushing about “the first American pope” when he stepped out on the balcony for the first time, I was intrigued and even enthusiastic. But now I’m not so sure it’s a good thing, because we Americans have a way of transforming wonderful things into common, informal, average things. And we turn the sacred into cheap jokes, as is already happening with a blizzard of memes on social media.
I haven’t read or watched much post-conclave news so far, but I suspect it won’t take long for media and social media especially to turn “His Holiness” into “Bobby from the neighborhood.” We’ll be reading about his childhood, we’ll see pages from his high school and college yearbooks, we’ll hear from classmates at Villanova, all of which will render him an “average Joe.” The sports media will look for any hint of athletic leanings, especially in the winter and early spring during basketball season when Villanova, his alma mater, usually does pretty well. Already, we’ve been told the Chicago native roots for the White Sox and not the Cubs, and by now there’s probably a package headed toward the Vatican mailroom containing a Sox jersey with “Leo XIV” stitched across the back.
I sort of liked it when popes were from foreign lands such as Italy, Poland, Germany and Argentina. For a Baptist from Texas, that created some distance and mystery, and with it, some respect for who he had become during his lifetime and especially for accepting this role of spiritual leadership in a world always fraught with turmoil and maybe more so now.
So, I’d like to urge everyone on the planet – Catholic and Baptist, religious and secular, American and otherwise – to resist the urge to slice and dice Pope Leo XIV into something he isn’t. Let’s give him time and room to lead and serve and show us who he is. My hope is we won’t succeed in dragging the new pope down into our too-familiar, too-casual, too-flippant way of being, but rather, we will be lifted to a way that is more spiritual, more thoughtful, more compassionate, more reverent.
And someday, if we see him throwing out a first pitch in Chicago or sitting courtside at Villanova, that will be fine too if that’s who he really is.