Liturgy News

POPE FRANCIS
Jorge Mario Bergoglio
1936–2025

Easter spurs us to action, to run like Mary Magdalene and the disciples. It invites us to have eyes that can ‘see beyond’, to perceive Jesus, the one who lives, as the God who reveals himself and makes himself present even today, who speaks to us, goes before us, surprises us. Like Mary Magdalene, every day we can experience losing the Lord, but every day we can also run to look for him again, with the certainty that he will allow himself to be found and will fill us with the light of his resurrection.

Brothers and sisters, this is the greatest hope of our life: we can live this poor, fragile and wounded existence clinging to Christ, because he has conquered death, he conquers our darkness and he will conquer the shadows of the world, to make us live with him in joy, forever. This is the goal towards which we press on, as the Apostle Paul said, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. Like Mary Magdalene, Peter and John, we hasten to meet Christ.

Easter Sunday 2025 was Pope Francis’ last day on earth. These words are from his Easter homily (read for him by one of the cardinals). They offer us an extraordinary last testimony to his prophetic twelve years as Bishop of Rome. He appeared on the balcony at midday, someone read his Urbi et Orbi peace message for him and, with great effort, he himself pronounced his final blessing. Then he moved through the crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square for one last time.

Right from the beginning, Francis astounded the Church by his own simplicity of life and by shifting the focus to the peripheries. Just a fortnight after his election, he celebrated the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper, not in the splendour of St Peter’s, but at a prison, washing the feet of prisoners – men and women, Christian, Muslim and atheist. On his last Holy Thursday, three days before his death, he once again spent time meeting with prisoners. Throughout his ministry, he recognised that, while no one is perfect, all are embraced by God’s mercy. Whatever a person’s situation, our task is not to judge or lay down the rules but to accompany them. Eucharistic communion, for him, was not a reward for the perfect but medicine for the sick. I see the Church, he said, as a field hospital after battle.

Much of Pope Francis’ leadership was not directly concerned with liturgy. He attempted to reform Church structures at the Vatican, he advocated care for the earth as our common home, acted in favour of refugees and the homeless. In recent years, he developed the idea of synodality. This picks up his criticism of rigid clericalism and promotes instead a genuine discernment and collaboration among all the baptised, clerical and lay. Over the twelve years of his pontificate, there were many liturgical elements – adding saints to the Roman calendar who express new models of sanctity, expanding instituted ministries to include women and adding the ministry of catechist, establishing Sunday of the Word of God, trying to keep official liturgies simple, and so forth.

Francis’ first major intervention in the field of liturgy came with his apostolic letter Magnum Principium (2017). Here he affirmed the ‘great principle’ of Vatican II that the liturgy should be comprehensible to people, notably by the use of the vernacular. This task was originally given to local bishops conferences and now Francis returned it to them. It was a significant move to decentralise control away from the Roman Curia. He effectively negated both the literalist translation principles and the approvals process enshrined in Liturgiam Authenticam (2001). The new liturgical priority was to facilitate an encounter with the living Christ which happens best in the context of one’s own culture. Magnum Principium was followed in 2019 by the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon which put the new approach into practice. Despite criticism that he was embracing pagan worship, Francis gave strong support to Indigenous spirituality and liturgical inculturation, he embraced diversity and popular piety, and he opened the way for the development of an Amazonian Rite.

Pope Francis created a storm of outrage on the part of some with his document Traditionis Custodes (2021). This restricted the use of the traditional Latin Mass. The background story is important here. When the reformed Mass was introduced after Vatican II, the previous Missal was abrogated but pastoral allowances were made for older priests who might have trouble with it. These concessions were formally established and then broadened by Pope John Paul II. Soon Latin Mass groups began to see this liturgy as something to be promoted and it came to enshrine a conservative stance on a range of Catholic issues. Pope Benedict XVI, keen to bring about unity in the Church and especially to reconcile the schismatic Society of Pius X (Lefebvrists), established the traditional Latin Mass as an ‘extraordinary form’ of the Roman Rite and removed any restrictions on its use. In actual fact, this move only empowered these groups to greater and more militant opposition to the reforms of Vatican Council II. Pope Francis commented: The opportunity offered… was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the perils of division. He therefore decreed that the current liturgical books are ‘the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite’ and set strict boundaries around the use of the ‘old Mass’.

Francis followed up with an apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi (2022) which addressed the criticism that the current vernacular liturgy had lost a ‘sense of the sacred’. Arguing that ‘mystery’ is not a reality obscured by clouds of incense or mysterious ritual, he showed that true wonder in the liturgy means marvelling at the fact that the salvific plan of God has been revealed in the paschal deed of Jesus and that the power of this paschal deed continues to reach us in the celebration of the ‘mysteries’ of the sacraments (DD 25). This was a new approach to liturgy, no longer simply restating the rules for a ‘correct’ liturgy, but promoting a more expressive ars celebrandi.

Pope Francis was refreshing in returning the Church to the visionary reforms of Vatican Council II. This was seen especially in his advocacy for the poor and marginalised, but it was also powerfully present in his liturgical interventions. Needless to say, some of these liturgical questions remain hot issues in the Church. They remain on the table for his successor to deal with.

POPE LEO XIV
Robert Francis Prevost – Elected 8 May 2025
What I am for you terrifies me, what I am with you consoles me. For you I am a bishop, with you I am a Christian. The first is a duty, the second is a grace. (Augustine, sermon 340)

Augustinian Pope Leo XIV cited this famous quote in his opening remarks after his election. It references the fundamental baptismal solidarity of every Christian person, irrespective of rank. He had begun with the biblical and liturgical greeting: Peace be with you! Referring to Pope Francis, he affirmed that God loves us all, unconditionally. United by our common baptism into Christ, we move forward without fear, together, hand in hand with God and with one another. He spoke about building bridges through dialogue and encounter. As bishop of Rome, he chose to speak in Italian, except for a greeting to his former diocese in Peru in Spanish. He affirmed that we want to be a forward-moving synodal Church, seeking peace, love and a closeness to those who are suffering. Clearly, Pope Leo sought to establish a strong continuity with the papacy of Francis.

In the weeks since his election, the background of Pope Leo XIV has been well explored in the media. A native of Chicago USA, he has spent almost all his adult life in Peru and Rome. After ordination as an Augustinian and obtaining a doctorate in Canon Law, he went to Peru as a missionary from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s. After a few years as Augustinian provincial in Chicago, he spent twelve years as Prior General of the Augustinians, based in Rome but visiting communities around the world. In 2014, he was appointed bishop of Chiclayo in the north of Peru and became a Peruvian citizen. In 2023, he was appointed prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and was nominated as a cardinal.

Despite his origins in Chicago, Pope Leo is independent of the polarisation of the Church in the USA but comes to us, like Pope Francis, from the peripheries of the global south. He was a missionary in Peru when communist guerillas were waging civil war (which in 1991 claimed the life of Australian martyr Sr Irene McCormack RSJ). He was a voice for democracy and justice; he stood with the poor and disenfranchised. As a bishop, his pastoral care broadened when Peru received 1.5 million refugees from Venezuela. His diocese was not far from the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, and he took part in the 2019 Amazon synod.

Pope Leo XIV’s motto refers to our unity in Christ: In Illo uno unum – ‘In the One, [we are] one’. Peace-making, unity and building bridges will be a priority for the new pope. He spoke strongly of this at his inaugural Mass: Brothers and sisters, I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world. In this our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalises the poorest. For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world. Peacemaking is directed therefore both within the Church and outwards to the world around us. But he is seeking a unity that is not uniformity, that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people. All of this augurs well for the approaches to localisation and the inculturation of the liturgy which Francis has been establishing. Addressing an assembly of Eastern patriarchs and bishops at the Jubilee of the Eastern Churches, Leo embraced and rejoiced in a diversity of liturgical rites: the renewal of the Church… through fidelity lived out in a plurality of forms.

He is a strong advocate of synodality and its processes of discernment rather than debate. This may well suit his character and style which is where he is very different from Pope Francis. Leo is clear, calm and measured. He will probably stick to script (Francis would sometimes set aside his text and speak off the cuff). Leo is a humble man, reserved and understated, who thinks before he acts and listens before he speaks. He has shown himself to be a steady administrator and has already spoken affirmatively to the employees of the Vatican and the Roman curia. He will need to continue to reform the organisation, cutting costs and making it more transparent and more missionary, but will likely try to do this by lessening tensions and working together more closely with curia staff.

An example of the strong continuity yet difference of style between Pope Leo and Pope Francis may be seen in a homily he gave at the ordination of new priests. Francis may well have warned against ‘clericalism’. Pope Leo spoke as follows: The depth, greatness and even duration of the divine joy that we now share are directly proportional to the bonds that exist and will deepen between you who are being ordained and the people from which you come, of which you remain a part and to which you are sent… Like Jesus, you meet people of flesh and blood whom the Father places on your path. Consecrate yourselves to them — without separating yourselves from them, without isolating yourselves, without making the gift you have received a kind of privilege.

How will all these aspects play out as he deals with issues in the Church? He has spoken of God’s inclusive love, but how will he deal with the place of the divorced and remarried in the Church or the possibilities for participation by gay Catholics? How will he deal with the polarisation in the American Church? Perhaps he will come with a new understanding of American culture. Finally what strategy will he adopt to foster harmony and concord with the groups who advocate the traditional Latin Mass? What will it mean to build bridges in this context?

For the present we wait. We trust that the Holy Spirit who has guided the Church to choose Robert Prevost as the pope will now inspire and guide him in his leadership of service, for the good of the Church and the world. We pray for him. Indeed, every time we celebrate Eucharist, we intercede for him and ask that God will be with him.