The Good Shepherd is risen! Each year, as we continue celebrating the joy of the Resurrection, the Church invites us to contemplate how the risen Christ has come back from the dead not only to set us free from sin, but to lead and guide His Church. We do so this year as the Church celebrates the election of a new shepherd who leads the Church in the Lord’s stead, Pope Leo XIV.

            Last Sunday we saw the headship of Peter among the Apostles. We saw the three essential tasks of the Successor of St. Peter, the Pope: strengthening the brethren by confirming their faith, feeding the sheep through perpetuating the sacramental life of the Church, and being willing to give his life for the Lord. Over the past two weeks at weekday Masses, we’ve read from the Acts of the Apostles and seen the work of the Holy Spirit in the beginnings of the Church. Each day we focused on aspect of the Apostles’ ministry and asked the Holy Spirit to give us a new Pope with those same qualities: their boldness of speech, their heroic martyrdoms, and their immense love for fellow believers and even for their persecutors.

Wednesday, the day the conclave began, we reflected on how we are preparing ourselves to listen to the voice of this new shepherd. What will he speak to us about? Likewise, today, we hear Christ saw that “my sheep hear my voice.” The world wants us to tune our ears to what the Pope will tell us about worldly matters. The unprecedented election of an American as Pope is exciting. “I know them,” Christ says about His sheep. We can likewise feel that the Successor of Peter knows us, since he grew up only three hours away!

            But there is also a danger. Having an American Pope heightens the tendency we already have to think about where the Pope would fall on the American political spectrum. Again, this plays out in how our ears are tuned to the voice of the shepherd. The world forms us to listen for what the new Pope will say about worldly matters: about geopolitical conflicts or even American political policies.

            Instead of tuning our ears to what the Pope will say about worldly matters, we listen for how the Pope will speak to us of Christ. Pope Leo began his pontificate with the very first words of Christ after His Resurrection: “Peace be with you!” What will the new Vicar of Christ tell us about His Master, our Shepherd?

            Popes have been known for defying expectations of what people think they will say. Pope Leo told the cardinals yesterday that his choice of the Papal name Leo was largely inspired by Pope Leo XIII, the founder of Catholic social teaching. The end of the 19^th Century was dominated by what was known as the “social question.” The industrial revolution had upended the rural, agrarian life of Europe and transformed the continent with rapid urbanization. Conflicts between the factory owners and laborers lead to the rise of socialism. Everyone expected Leo XIII to come down on the side of the owners because of the Church’s traditional closeness to the aristocracy and Her role in upholding the traditional structures of society. But Leo XIII shocked the world by emphasizing the rights of workers – even to organize themselves to demand just wages and safe working conditions. He encouraged the forming of Catholic labor unions, but even permitted Catholics to join socialist unions where it was not feasible to form Catholic labor unions because the rights of workers were so important. He condemned both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism

            Closer to our own day, when Joseph Ratzinger was elected as Pope Benedict XVI, secular media portrayed him as “God’s rottweiler” because of his leadership of the Vatican’s “doctrine office.” We were told to expect a mean-spirited Pope who would spend his time crushing heresy. Thus the world was quite surprised when Benedict’s first encyclical was on Love – Deus Caritas Est.

            The world wants us to tune our ears to what the new Pope will say about worldly matters. And the Evil One wants to inspire fear and suspicion in our hearts. But the attitude of the Christian should be to tune our ears to what the new Pope will tell us about Christ. Indeed, in his first homily as Pope on Friday morning, Pope Leo reflected on Peter’s confession of faith. Who does Peter say that Christ is? It is in this light that we also listen to what the Pope tells us about the world, and in light of his own confession of Christ, we listen to the voice of the new Pope with filial trust. The new Pope Leo’s inspiration, Pope Leo XIII, softened his predecessor’s confrontational stance towards the modern world, while also renewing the Church’s traditional philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to inform the way that the Church thinks about Herself, Her doctrine, and the world around Her.

            The world’s eyes these past weeks have been on Rome. Rome rapidly gained prestige in the early centuries of the Church because of the purity with which the Apostolic faith was preserved there. In Constantinople, the other imperial city in the East, controversies raged about the divinity and humanity of Christ. But Rome offered a consistently clear witness and a bulwark of what had been conserved from the Apostles. As the original Pope Leo – St. Leo the Great – observed in the 300s, Rome, the teacher of error, the spreader of pagan error and vice, became the student of the truth of the Gospel.

            The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, and since the Bishop of Rome leads the universal Church as the representative of Christ, we are all in some sense Romans. From the loggia of St. Peter’s, Pope Leo XIV’s first official act was to give the Urbi et Orbi blessing – to the city, and to the world. It is from Rome that we have received the Catholic faith. Our Romanness is expressed in our use of Rome’s language, Latin, in our worship. It is expressed in the sobriety of our liturgy. In our parish church, the mosaic in our sanctuary is modeled on the famous apse mosaic of the Church of St. Clement in Rome, where St. Clement, the second successor of Peter is buried. As of last Sunday, our sanctuary is even more Roman with the new altar frontals, ambo falls, and tabernacle veils that imitate the traditional decoration of Roman churches.

            We can think of these as vestments – vestments not just for Christ present in the priest, but for Christ symbolically present in the altar, and really present in Word and Sacrament at the ambo and the Tabernacle. This traditional practice gives a greater attention to the rhythm of the liturgical year even outside of the celebration of Mass by clothing the sanctuary in the liturgical color of the day (such as the red with which it was clothed during the week last week as we invoked the Holy Spirit’s intercession for the Conclave), and reminds us how Christ is truly the One celebrating Mass: Christ present in His Real Eucharistic presence, Christ present in His Word, Christ symbolized by the altar, and Christ present in His priest. Just as Christ is the one who leads the Church through His vicar, the Pope, He is the one really celebrating Mass.

            As the white smoke billowed on Thursday, I went to our eighth-grade room to watch with joyful anticipation for our new spiritual father in Christ (and worked in Latin and Church history lessons too!). I did that not only because I love spending time with those kids, and not only to form them to love the new Pope, but because I needed their enthusiasm and excitement for a new spiritual father for the universal Church. Sitting in my office I could only experience nervousness and anxiety, but surrounded by young people who love the Church, we tapped into the same excitement and joy present in St. Peter’s Square.

            Christ tells us today, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” Tune your ears to the voice of the Shepherd by listening with filial trust and respect to the new Successor of St. Peter, who knows us as our fellow countryman, but is now called to lead a “great multitude, which no one could count,

from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” Reject the voices of suspicion and the Evil One who wants to divide the Church. Listen to what Pope Leo tells us about Christ, and thank God for the gift of a new shepherd who will confirm us in the faith, feed the flock, and not hesitate to lay down his life for the Lord.

            As Pope Leo XIV has himself told us: “[It] is essential that we too repeat, with Peter: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Mt 16:16). … Saint Ignatius, who was led in chains to [Rome], the place of his impending sacrifice, wrote to the Christians there: ‘Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world no longer sees my body’ (Letter to the Romans, IV, 1). Ignatius was speaking about being devoured by wild beasts in the arena – and so it happened – but his words apply more generally to 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 (cf. Jn 3:30), to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him. May God grant me this grace, today and always, through the loving intercession of Mary, Mother of the Church.” Amen.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

IV Sunday of Easter, A.D. MMXXV