(s.m.) Professor Leonardo Lugaresi, author of the note published on this page, is a distinguished scholar of the Church Fathers.
As too is Pope Leo XIV, who in citing the Fathers as he frequently does, starting with “his” Augustine, shows that he grasps their thoughts with rare depth.
And precisely this familiarity of the new pope with the great Christian “tradition” is a decisive key – in Lugaresi’s judgment – to understanding how he intends to carry out his service as successor of Peter, in the wake not only of his most recent predecessors but of the whole history of the Church, leading back “everything to the original truth.”
The following note is an excerpt from a longer text, which can be read in full on the blog “Vanitas ludus omnis” of Professor Lugaresi.
In the illustration, the Chair of St. Peter surrounded by the Church Fathers Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, and John Chrysostom, in the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica, the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
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Tradition and Right Use. A Note on Leo XIV’s “Style”
by Leonardo Lugaresi
In the analyses that many observers are making of the first steps of Leo XIV’s pontificate, it seems that what has prevailed so far is the use of the category of continuity and discontinuity, applied to the comparison with the preceding pontificate.
This criterion, however, proves to be largely inadequate for understanding the meaning of what is happening in the Church, and in particular it is of no help in grasping one aspect of the style of thought and government of Pope Leo XIV, which instead appears already to be emerging clearly, above all on the level of method.
What is striking, in all of the first statements of the new pope, is the happy naturalness with which he continually appeals to the tradition of the Church through great authors who are witnesses to it: from Ignatius of Antioch to Ephrem the Syrian, Isaac of Nineveh, Symeon the New Theologian, Benedict of Nursia, Leo the Great, and repeatedly to “his” Augustine. Brief references, but not affected, rather all of them relevant for their pertinence to the themes that the pope was touching on. These patristic references are accompanied by the constant one to the magisterium of the modern popes, in particular Leo XIII and Francis.
It is precisely to this last fact that I would like to draw attention. This could easily be interpreted either as evidence of the new pope’s substantial continuity with his predecessor, from whom he would be distinguished only on the surface, due to obvious and expected differences in temperament; or, on the contrary, as a mere tactical and instrumental expedient, aimed at preventing and easing possible hostile reactions toward a papacy that would be effecting with discretion a substantial rupture with the so-called “Church of Francis.”
I believe that both approaches are wrong. What Pope Leo has expressed, in every act and word of his during these first weeks of his pontificate, is nothing other than the authentically Catholic conception of tradition.
On the manner of understanding this concept, there appears to be very widespread among Catholics today a misunderstanding that paradoxically bands together to a large extent the opposing fronts of the “traditionalists” and the “progressives”: that of linking tradition to the past, it matters little whether with the intent of preserving and re-proposing this past, or on the contrary to reject it and definitively surpass it.
Tradition, in fact, in the authentically Catholic sense does not indicate an object, but rather a process, indeed a relationship. It refers to a relationship of transmission, or better of donation, that essentially involves living actors (donor and donee) and reciprocal interactions that go beyond time.
In this sense, tradition is always alive: it belongs to the present, not to the past, because it happens now. And precisely inasmuch as it is alive, it has the authority and the power to demand obedience in the present. It is at the heart of faith, bringing to it an essential aspect without which there simply is no more Christianity. Christian faith, in fact, is by its nature always and only a response to an appeal that rests with God alone, who first reveals himself to us. Such is the faith of Abraham, of Moses, of the prophets, and the faith of the apostles, on which ours is founded.
It follows from this that, in this sense, the word of the Church is always and only a received word, and therefore intrinsically “traditional.” As received, this word must be guarded and transmitted to others faithfully, according to the modality clearly declared by Paul right from the beginning of Christian history: “I delivered to you first of all what I also received” (1 Cor 15:3). Defining the ecclesial word as a received word also means affirming that the Church, including the pope, has no power over it: it serves it and is not served by it. It therefore cannot dispose of it as it wishes, for example to make it more suitable to meet the mentality and expectations of contemporary society, as we understand them.
But there is another aspect that must be brought to light, in order to adequately grasp the Catholic character of this concept: the word of God, to which each of us responds personally, does not come to us through a direct and personal revelation (as in the interior illumination, “sola Scriptura,” of the Protestant conception), but is transmitted to us by an uninterrupted “martyrial” chain of authoritative witnesses, and therefore reaches us enriched, indeed lived by all the responses it has received in the course of Christian history. As Joseph Ratzinger splendidly wrote, referring to the role of the Fathers of the Church in contemporary theology: “Only because the word has found a response has it remained such and effective. The nature of the word is a reality of relationship; it ceases to exist not only when no one pronounces it, but also when no one listens to it.” For this reason “we cannot read and listen to the word without considering the response that first received it and became constitutive of its permanence.”
This is why the Church can never, in any case, break with tradition or neglect it: it is always “in the convoy of the Fathers” and of all those who have gone before us in faith and have handed it down to us that it reads Scripture and understands Revelation. Tradition therefore has an authority that no one in the Church can evade: least of all the pope. The only Church that we know, in fact, is of Christ, and the only qualification that belongs to it, with reference to a human function of custody and government, is that of being “apostolic,” that is, laid down on the very foundation of tradition, which must be welcomed and understood in its entirety.
This means that – whether the traditionalists like it or not – today it also includes Vatican Council II and the pontificates that followed it, including the one that ended last April. Toward which, therefore, for all the criticisms that may raised, it would not make any Catholic sense to invoke a “damnatio memoriae.”
Of course, the history of the Church in its human aspect is full of errors and even of misdeeds, and from this perspective a discernment without cutting corners must be exercised toward it. And here significance is taken on by another aspect that has greatly struck me in the first acts of the new pope, and it is the practice of “right use,” the “chrêsis” of which the Fathers of the Church speak.
It is to the credit of a great scholar who recently passed away, Christian Gnilka (1936–2025), to have drawn attention to the centrality of this concept in the approach that the Fathers have toward profane culture, and in general toward all worldly goods. “Chrêsis” is an attitude that escapes the dichotomy, prevalent today, of inclusion and exclusion, because it keeps itself far both from acritical acceptance (which then degenerates into submission) and from prejudicial rejection (whose offspring is sectarianism), but is bent upon meeting the other in every occasion, “testing everything and holding fast what is good,” according to the Pauline formula of 1 Thess 5:21, that is, effecting a “krisis,” the judgment that “enters and separates”: it is interested in everything, it gets involved with anyone, but in everything it encounters it distinguishes what is good, beautiful, and true from what is not. With what criterion? The only one possible for the Christian: what Paul again, with a brilliant expression, calls the “nous” – the thought, the mind – of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 2:16).
Bringing back everything to its original truth: this is the “right use,” the “chrêsis” of which the Fathers of the Church speak, which is most concisely summarized in Paul’s declaration to the Athenians: “What you worship without knowing it, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23). This Christian claim, in which is made concrete the task of being “salt of the earth and light of the world” that Christ assigned to his followers, however applies not only to the world, but also, in a certain sense, to the Church itself in its human component. Every human thing, in fact, needs to be continually purified, corrected, and put back in place: in a word, restored to the truth of the divine plan. Here lies the origin of the principle “ecclesia semper reformanda,” not in an instance of updating to the goings-on of the world.
Peter’s task is essentially to preserve the truth of the faith and the unity of the people of God. One misunderstanding in recent years has been that of thinking instead that it is up to the pope to “start the processes” of a change without it being clear in which direction to go: one may think for example of all the confused talk of “synodality.” But today it would be equally wrong to presume that it is up to the pope to carry out a sort of “counter-reform.” If I may hazard a prediction, I believe that this will not happen anyway. I think instead that we can expect from Leo XIV not so much explicit corrections or formal retractions of certain ambiguous, confused, and in some cases problematic aspects of the previous pontificate, but rather their “right use,” which, if I may so express it, “puts them back in their place.”
One fundamental factor of safety in the new pontificate seems already to be a given, based on the experience of these first weeks. Unlike his predecessor, Leo will not give us cause to fear that he will play the pope “as he sees fit.” He made this clear from the beginning, when, referring to a phrase of Ignatius of Antioch (but echoing reflections that Benedict XVI had also made in his time), he defined “an indispensable commitment for all those in the Church who exercise a ministry of authority. It is to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified, to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him.” It is in this sense that I would hazard to predict that the style of his pontificate will be Ratzingerian and patristic.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.