Leo XIV: One Year of Pontificate
One year ago, on Monday, May 8, 2025, the pontificate of Leo XIV began — Robert Francis Prevost, the 267th pontiff of the Catholic Church, the first American Pope, and the first member of the Order of Saint Augustine.
"Peace be with all of you… This is the peace of the Risen Christ, a peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering" — these were the first words of the new Pontiff, spoken from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica. From the very outset, Leo XIV chose to center his ministry on peace and unity, both within and beyond the Church. To that end, he called for "building bridges, through dialogue, through encounter, uniting ourselves to be one people, always in peace." A Pope who is a "bridge-builder," a Pope who is a "Pilgrim of peace and unity" — as he himself described his mission in the homily of the Mass at Bamenda Airport in Cameroon, this past April 17. Peace is certainly a lofty and noble goal, above all when it is built on the cornerstone that is Christ, Head of the Church and Savior of the world. Yet the current situation of the Church and the world is unfortunately not favorable to bridge-builders and pilgrims of peace.
Assessing a year of pontificate in light of this reality is no simple task, because the totality of the Pontiff's words, acts, and documents does not yet point clearly in a single direction, nor does it allow us to anticipate the pastoral priorities and perspectives that will guide the Church going forward. To date, the Pope's choices have been cautious and measured, while the problems drawing near — and which he faces in an uncertain future — are grave and deep.
The gravest of all these problems is the German situation. On April 21, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and formerly an adviser to Pope Francis in the governance of the Church, recommended to the pastoral services of his diocese the use of a manual entitled "Blessing Gives Strength to Love," which proposes various "formulas" for blessing same-sex couples and divorced and remarried individuals. The text was approved by the Conference of April 4, 2025, which brings together the German Bishops' Conference and the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK).
When asked about this matter during the return flight from his African visit on Thursday, April 23, Leo XIV sought to clarify his position with these words: "The Holy See has clearly made known that we do not agree with the formalized blessing of couples, in this case homosexual couples, as you ask, or couples in irregular situations, beyond what was specifically authorized by Pope Francis in saying that all persons receive blessings. Everyone is invited to follow Jesus, and everyone is invited to seek conversion in their own life. Going beyond this — today I think the issue can cause more division than unity, and that we should seek ways to build our unity on Jesus Christ and on what Jesus Christ teaches."
The Pope thus disagrees with the German Synodal Way and implicitly distances himself from the Declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Fiducia Supplicans, published on December 18, 2023, and approved by Pope Francis, which permits pastoral blessing — though not ritual blessing — for couples in "irregular" situations and for same-sex couples. Yet Pope Leo is aware that the German bishops will continue to invoke that document, at least until one of equal or greater authority, but of a different character, supersedes it.
The position of the German bishops, for its part, is clear and, in its own way, consistent. Since January 2020, the Bishops' Conference has placed itself at the head of a "Synodal Path" whose objective is to extend to the universal Church the "binding" decisions of its "permanent synod" — among them the ministerial ordination of women and the full inclusion of homosexuals in the Church, opening to them all the sacraments, including marriage.
The Holy See has intervened on multiple occasions to caution the German bishops, ever since Abp. Filippo Iannone — whom Leo XIV in 2025 placed at the head of the Dicastery for Bishops — wrote to their president, Cardinal Marx, to warn that these disruptive topics "do not concern the Church in Germany but the universal Church and, with few exceptions, cannot be the subject of deliberations or decisions of a particular Church." But Cardinal Marx himself, in an interview given to the weekly magazine Stern on March 30, 2022, had declared: "The Catechism is not set in stone. One may also call into question what it says." And he effectively reaffirmed as much on April 21.
Leo XIV thus finds himself confronted with a serious rupture which, following the German example, could spread to other episcopates, placing him in a position of near-minority within the Church.
But another problem looms on the horizon: the episcopal consecrations without pontifical mandate that the Society of Saint Pius X has announced for July 1, 2026. It appears that the Holy See is preparing a decree of excommunication analogous to the one promulgated by the Congregation for Bishops on July 1, 1988. But beyond any judgment on the consecrations themselves and the censures that will follow from them, one cannot help but observe that we will find ourselves faced with an ecclesial fracture — one that likewise undermines, or at the very least delays, the hoped-for goal of peace and unity in the Church. After the excommunication of 1988, Benedict XVI had, so to speak, extended a bridge to the traditionalist world by promulgating the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum in 2007 and by lifting the excommunications imposed on the Society of Saint Pius X in 2009. Subsequently, Pope Francis granted the Society's priests the faculty to hear confessions validly and established procedures for the recognition of marriages celebrated in their priories. On the other hand, if in 1988 one could have imagined a gradual disappearance of the Society following the death of its founder, the reality today is that it numbers more than 700 priests, over 200 seminarians, more than a hundred priories, and hundreds of Mass centers in over 60 countries, with hundreds of thousands of faithful throughout the world. What is set to happen in July will not be the building of a bridge, but the creation of a new chasm between this world and the Holy See.
Against the backdrop of international affairs, the war between Russia and Ukraine has now been joined by the conflict pitting the United States and Israel against Iran in the Middle East. The Pope has condemned this war, as he has all others, but peace remains distant; and a clash between Donald Trump and Leo XIV has recently opened a rift that is perhaps the most serious in the history of relations between the Holy See and the United States in the past century.
The Pope bears no direct responsibility for any of this. Yet viewed through the lens of peace and unity — understood as absolute goods — the balance sheet of his first year of pontificate appears worrying. If one remembers, however, that peace and unity are not absolute values but are grounded in Truth and Justice, then even conflicts and divisions can be salutary, helping to rediscover the path that has been lost in the chaos. And that is the best prayer and the most sincere wish one can offer for Leo XIV: that he lead us to the true peace of Christ, in the Kingdom of Christ, confronting all the difficulties, sufferings, and struggles that this journey may entail.
