Pope Leo has summoned the world’s Cardinals to a Consistory this week, a return to normal practice that was mostly sidelined for the past dozen years in favor of “synodal” gatherings. So now that the Jubilee Year has concluded, the current pope is doing something new – and old – in any event, a departure from his predecessor’s ways, in the very first days of 2026. What might that mean?
A Consistory is an opportunity for Cardinals to be real collaborators with the Holy Father, to speak with him – and with one another – about a globe-spanning divine mission. What they discuss and how it influences Leo’s papacy can set the course of the Church over the next decade and more. And there’s much that needs saying, and let’s pray will be, beyond the tired journalistic obsessions with immigration, climate, LGBTs, women. Because a chilling question faces us, pointedly now, which a Certain Person raised long ago: “But when the Son of Man comes [again], will he find faith on earth?”
Christianity in various forms won’t disappear from the world any time soon. But the full truth of faith, the one that saints and doctors, missionaries, martyrs, and confessors have labored and suffered and died for, is teetering. This, of course, for many reasons, not least that it is attacked, both inside and out, by people who wish it ill.
We shouldn’t avert our eyes from this fact. It was unfortunate (in the present Christian’s view) that the Holy Father said in the closing days of the Jubilee Year: “Christians have no enemies, only brothers and sisters.” We understand what he intended, of course, and can even second that, in a way. But it’s true only at a very high level of abstraction, and not the whole, which is to say the Catholic, truth. Failure to follow the whole truth leads, as we’ve seen since Vatican II’s virtual abandonment of the notion of the Church Militant, to misreading the world we’re living in, with disastrous effects.
When Voltaire famously said Écrasez l’infâme, it was far from the beginning – or the end – of hatred of the Catholic Faith. The French Revolution and its totalitarian offshoots demonstrated that. In the Sermon on the Mount no less, Jesus taught, “love your enemies [ἐχθροὺς].” (Matthew 5:44-45) Even before Christ was born, Zechariah, invoked much earlier Hebrew wisdom:
Through His holy prophets He promised of old
That He would save us from our enemies [ἐχθρῶν],
From the hands of all who hate us.
Pope Leo’s spiritual father, St. Augustine, wisely wrote, “That your enemies have been created is God’s doing; that they hate you and wish to ruin you is their own doing. What should you say about them in your mind? ‘Lord be merciful to them, forgive them their sins, put the fear of God in them, change them!’”
And of course, as any true Christian should believe, there’s THE Enemy – who hates God and tempted Eve to bring ruin on the whole human race.
So the whole Judeo-Christian tradition – no less than ordinary human experience – tells us that we do and will have enemies, whether we want to acknowledge that or not. And we should not only pray for them, but take strong steps – in ways that St. Augustine was crucial in helping the Church and the whole Western world to think out via just-war theory.
We have a duty, for instance, to prevent harm to individual Christians and others (thousands have died recently in Nigeria, in addition to several other nations); or to churches (France is currently losing two religious buildings to arson per month); or to the very presence of the Christians throughout the world, especially in places like China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Muslim-dominated nations, about which the Vatican remains largely silent.
So here’s a simple proposal that might stimulate cardinatianal thinking at this time of Consistory. Pope Francis starkly claimed that we should be building bridges not walls. A bridge is a good thing – in its proper place. But so are walls, because we may wish to “live at peace with everyone.” But there are enemies to whom only a fool would open the gates. The whole Christian life is about what we once were not reluctant to call spiritual battle. Indeed, often the proper dividing of one thing from another – whether a distinction between right and wrong, or the physical protection of the faithful by thwarting malefactors – promotes Godly order, peace, and charity.
It’s easy to see why, at Vatican II, some people deplored the Church’s “fortress mentality.” But sixty years later, it’s also easy to see the results of the open Church. What’s sorely lacking in today’s Church is less openness to the “Other” than failure to defend – and define – Herself.
As Benedict XVI remarked, it was right that the Council recognized the partial good that exists in other religious traditions. But if you lean too heavily into that – in order to get along with others – you can’t help but lose missionary zeal, the conviction that it’s through the full Truth about Jesus, the only Savior, that we can be redeemed from our partly true, disastrously false paths. No one sacrifices his life to spreading the Gospel if he thinks that others are already pretty much fine where they are.
We don’t expect – or want – a modern pope to call for Crusades, like some of his predecessors. But we do expect a true leader to recognize threats and put on the Pauline Armor of Light, especially when even secular observers have already begun to push back against the militarization of sexual identity, the cancellation of voices deemed guilty of Islamophobia, Homophobia, “hate,” patriarchy, “bigotry,” etc.
These are not easy problems to solve, but they’re easy enough to see. Various approaches are possible, even necessary. May the pope and Cardinals be inspired to find them. But a crucial first step is to take the full measure of the truth: that bridges have their uses, but so do walls.
