Virgil’s Aeneid – the epic poem about the founding of Rome that virtually every literate person in the West has read since the time of Christ – has a line that has puzzled many a reader. Aeneas descends to the underworld. He sees evil souls being punished, the good enjoying the Elysian Fields (roughly, heaven), and a parade of the future heroes who will bring about the glory of Rome. One figure in particular is striking (and frustrating when you’re a student trying to parse the Latin): tu Maximus ille es, unus qui nobis cunctando restituis rem (“You are, Fabius Maximus, who alone by delay renewed our State.”) Fabius Maximus was a legendary general who by shrewd “delaying” tactics defeated the fearful leader of Carthage’s army, Rome’s greatest opponent, Hannibal.
We don’t often think of delay as a way to win wars – or win anything for that matter. And it’s unusual to see Romans, who just around the time of Jesus brutally conquered wherever they wanted, praising a practitioner of military finesse. When the Cunctator (“Delayer”) took over, a huge number of Rome’s troops had just been crushed at the battle of Cannae, and many thought Rome should simply surrender to Carthage. But Fabius Maximus roused the city and began a long campaign of attrition, avoiding great battles against impossible odds, but chipping away at the enemy in many small skirmishes. The Carthaginian armies eventually collapsed.
Roman history is unknown to most readers today. But all this has been in my mind as I’ve been thinking lately about Pope Leo and what is likely to be his long papacy. Speculations about this are already tiresome and range from dismay to optimism. One thing we can already start to see, however, is that he’s not a man for head-on major battles – as much as many people (myself included) would like swift and strong action.
He’s clearly a Fabius Maximus type. The cumulative effect of many small acts will determine the Church’s course for the next two decades and will decide whether She will, slowly, make headway against the many forces, within and without, poised – let’s be frank – to destroy Her.
I’ve long believed that the pope does not have to be a global ambulance chaser, so to speak, inserting himself into what look like – to the worldly – the Really Important Things. (The Vatican’s recent call for a two-state solution in Israel, for example, not only proposed an impossibility, but was a misuse of the Church’s moral authority where it has no more insight or influence than anyone else.)
By all means: denounce war; discourage gun crime (without thinking you have a solution about mass shooters in a heavily-armed place like America); encourage welcoming the stranger (also without thinking that that it’s an immigration policy); advocate care of Creation; warn about the threats of AI. But the real action – Pope Leo has signaled this repeatedly – is to encounter Jesus Christ and to live His goodness and truth.
It’s more than enough for any pope to feed and water God’s people and to invite those outside to join the fold – by conversion and small daily steps of repentance, not by the politically inspired suicide of “diversity” and “inclusion.”
Until these last days, I had hopes that Pope Leo got that.
After the LGBT Jubilee fiasco this past weekend, I also have doubts.
First, we saw the spectacle last week of Fr. James Martin putting a pre-emptive spin on the pope’s views about LGBTs and the Church. He reported that he “heard” Leo tell him to continue his ministry along the lines that Pope Francis had already encouraged.
As an American, Pope Leo must be aware that this sort of thing has been a bone of contention for decades, not only during the Bergoglio Papacy. In 1976, the Detroit Call to Action (Robert Prevost was 21) was already agitating for: married and women priests, Communion for the divorced without an annulment, changes in teaching about homosexuality, lay participation in Church governance. As a French poet once put it, “Everything changes but the avant-garde.”
Almost a half century later, except for: confused pronouncements by Francis (nervously, in a footnote) about Communion for remarrieds and others in “irregular situations”; the vague “welcoming” and “outreach” to LGBTs without any open change in teaching; the never-ending saga of “deaconesses,” which has gone nowhere; and the multi-year muddle that is synodality, how much has changed? The dike is cracked in places and could easily collapse, but so far has held.
Pope Leo didn’t meet personally over the weekend with the bizarre LGBT Jubilee contingent parading around Rome and claiming some kind of acceptance by the Church. It’s impossible to believe he wasn’t asked.
Fr. Martin, who has been a master of his own steady campaign of attrition – aided and abetted by the mainstream media who magnify the slightest signs of Church weakness into liberal victories – preemptively offered the excuse that Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar are piled high on Leo’s plate. But surely a pope can take a brief meeting with a group he supports, if he wants to.
But Leo also didn’t do two other things, small things in their way, but needful:
- He needed to announce that any “welcoming” of LGBTs must take place under the undivided moral tradition that comes down to us from Moses to Jesus, St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Alphonsus Liguori, Newman, JPII, Benedict, and many others.
- And he needed to take steps – the official Jubilee calendar actually went back and forth on this – so that the LGBT event, clearly engineered by the usual suspects inside the Vatican, never happened.
There are no other events for groups celebrating sins – pickpockets or adulterers. Why this one, unless Leo, by his silence, intends to align himself with those seeking a moral revolution in the Church?
Whether he meant to or not, that’s the situation he’s now put himself in.
These are large failures, and we know that great popes like John Paul and Benedict also struggled to tame heterodox forces in the Church. In this case, Leo could have easily blocked them by the small tactics he prefers. Because the stakes are large: nothing less than standing up to the anti-Christian forces in our world, protecting Rome – and all of us.
