a pope in the heritage of François as of Benoît XVI

The new American pope will have resumed during his first interventions all the great leit -motivs of François – Peace, Ponts, Synodality, proximity to the poor and the excluded – and will have emphasized the memory of the one had who had established a relationship of real confidence. He signed up in his wake. We could have feared the opposite of a pope from the United States of Donald Trump!

By his style, a certain reserve, the care of his words, his contained emotion, Robert Francis Prevost seems someone who does not want to rush things and people, who does not use shock formulas, which is less familiar with the crowd: he also recalls the personality that is both luminous and shy of a Benoît XVI.

On the one hand, François, by his criticism of clericalism and worldliness, his desire to descend from the pontifical pedestal, to walk “in the midst of the sheep”, to hammer that we need each of them, including the most rejected. On the other, Benoit XVI with his discretion and his subtlety, his very pure high spirituality: both could find themselves in the magnificent definition that Leon XIV made of his mission of the Pope, the bishop, the priest: whoever exercises in the Church a responsibility, he said, must “disappear so that Christ remains, being small to be recognized and glorified. To abandon any protagonism, any worldly confidence in power, in structures, in money, in religious marketing projects, to abandon itself to that (Christ) which leads the Church. “He intends to be” humble servant of God and his brothers, and nothing else. »»

The rejection of arrogance had gathered these deeply different popes, François and Benoît. Like them too, the new church chief condemned contemporary fascinations in his first homily for “technology, money success, power, pleasure”.

To define the church, it is the comparison with the moon that reflects sunlight without being the sun that is two and their successor. Benoît XVI had been able to describe with touching words the meaning of this famous image. And François has expressed many times how holy the Church is both holy by the mystery that links it to Christ and imperfect by its structures, its narrowness, its exclusions, its rigidities, the betrayals of its representatives.

A imperfection in which François understood himself with humility. If Joseph Ratzinger did not do the same for himself, by discretion, out of delicacy, he did not hesitate to say before his election to what extent the church is “a boat which takes the water from all sides”. In 2009 after four years of pontificate, he pushed the nail: “We saw that in the stone net, there are also bad fish. Humble, aware of his growing difficulty in piloting the boat, he had been able to resign.

The fact for Léon XIV to be an Augustinian, of a begging order which recalls the beloved Franciscans of François, to have been a long missionary in Peru, to have a knowledge of the excluded of the suburbs of Latin America brings him closer to the Argentinian pope. But the same fact of being Augustinian joins the heart of the spirituality of Benoît XVI, who venerated the great theologian of the beginnings of Christianity.

In total the Léon XIV style therefore seems to be a mixture between a pontiff eager “a dialogue confident with the contemporary world”, of a real synodality, of a missionary spirit open to the outskirts – it is the François side – and a pontiff, which, in a talkative, worried and dispersed world, intends to express the sweetness of grace and think before acting – is the Benoît XVI side. The program is Bergoglien, but the way of doing things could be rather Ratzingerian, with more caution on the dividing subjects of society.