Leo XIV, one step at a time

The picture emerging of Leo XIV is not one of a Pope who makes impetuous choices or grand gestures, but of a thoughtful Pope who calmly weighs every decision.

With the appointment of Monsignor Miroslaw Wachowski as nuncio to Iraq, for example, Leo XIV may have laid the first piece in what promises to be a significant turnover, which will occur not suddenly but over the course of years.

After a dozen years of Pope Francis, we have grown used to impetuosity and grand – frequently dramatic – gestures, and have come to expect or even desire such and similar. For journalists, they make great copy. For the Church, they are the exception rather than the rule of papal governance.

Why is the Wachowski appointment so significant, then?

Wachowski had been the Vatican’s undersecretary for Relations with States since 2019. A highly regarded “deputy foreign minister,” he led the Vatican delegation in negotiations with China and Vietnam in recent years. His promotion to nuncio, especially in a key location like Iraq, is not unexpected. Had Francis still been Pope, it would have been an expected promotion and would not have aroused any interest.

We are, however, in the era of Leo XIV. Wachowski is the first important name in the Secretariat of State to be reassigned. And so, an otherwise unreportable appointment becomes newsworthy, if only because Leo XIV’s choice of successor could also send a clear signal to the Secretariat of State, indicate a direction, and establish a governing line.

Said simply, the appointment is significant for the place it leaves vacant in the Secretariat of State, as much as it is for the place it fills in the nunciature to Iraq.

It will take at least a month, however, for the Pope to appoint a new “deputy foreign minister.” As long as Wachowski is in office, the appointment will not take place. And the same will be true for many other appointments that Leo XIV finds himself having to ponder.

Michael Czerny, Arthur Roche, Kurt Koch, Marcello Semeraro, and Kevin Farrell will retire upon reaching retirement age (they are all between 76 and 79). The Pope will also have to appoint a successor as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. In short, there are six key Curia positions to fill.
Leo XIV will take his time to decide. This doesn’t mean that all governing bodies will be changed at the same time. Many are insistently talking about the removal of the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. Such a removal, however, doesn’t seem logical, considering Parolin’s well-known and respected diplomatic reputation.

Many would like to see the heads of the cardinals who champion synodality, starting with Mario Grech and Victor Manuel Fernandez. But why would Leo XIV cut off heads indiscriminately? Ultimately, no cardinal can make weighty decisions without the Pope’s consent.
Everything suggests that the pontificate of Leo XIV will absorb most of the situations that arose during the pontificate of Pope Francis.

This is also evident in the only long-term interview granted by the Pope to date, for the book Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the 21st Century.

In the interview, Leo XIV’s cautious approach to many issues is evident. He doesn’t deny welcoming gay people, but at the same time, he states that Church doctrine will not change. He doesn’t deny that women will hold Vatican leadership positions, but he effectively sets aside any push for women deacons, emphasizing that the diaconate still needs to be genuinely understood. He doesn’t deny Pope Francis’s policy on China, but he makes it clear that he could change it, and emphasizes that he is also in contact with the “underground” Chinese communities.

But there is an even more illuminating passage, and it concerns the Mass with the Old Order. Ultimately, Leo XIV acknowledges the ideological polarization but believes that they will eventually need to sit down and discuss the issue. This is a sign that the Pope wants to leave behind not only the divisions that characterized the pontificate of Pope Francis, who disparagingly called those who preferred the traditional Mass “backsliders,” – indietristi in Italian – but also the lack of communion that characterized the post-Second Vatican Council.

If communion is Leo XIV’s primary goal, then it makes no sense for the Pope to engage in a laborious spoils system that would only increase divisions and controversy. This, ultimately, is exactly what Leo XIV does not want.

Facts may eventually prove these predictions false. And yet, the image of the current Pope points decisively toward absorption. The departed heads of dicasteries will be absorbed, with a gentle generational turnover that also takes into account the different factions. The question of the traditional Mass will be resolved. Much of the post-conciliar debate, which has only served to polarize the Church, will be resolved. Most, if not all, will be resolved precisely by absorption rather than confrontation or conflict.

What will be most difficult to absorb is the legal conundrum created by Pope Francis’s ersatz approach to matters of justice, both ecclesiastical and civil, epitomized on the civil side by the trial over the management of funds of the Secretariat of State, the appellate phase of which begins in earnest this week. It’s a difficult business to absorb, because the Pope finds himself having to untangle a tangle of extraordinary and other measures that have not only complicated matters but have also made the Holy See’s system vulnerable.

With the sentence appealed, many of the Promotor of Justice’s reconstructions need to be proven; the profiles of guilt are not clearly delineated. Meanwhile, the violation of canon law remains in the four rescripta that Pope Francis had drafted during the investigation, changing the rules of the trial on the fly.

In that case, Leo XIV will be called upon to intervene. He will neither be able nor willing to disown his predecessor, and it is unlikely that a pardon granted to the accused would be accepted—the accused wants to be acquitted, not pardoned. But Leo XIV will still have to find a way to restore the Vatican justice system, which has undergone three judicial reforms in the last six years.

The “Vaticanization” of the Holy See, the moment when the Vatican State gained the upper hand over the curial bodies, is today the central issue, the major knot to be unraveled. Leo XIV, however, will have to do so by creating a team of direct collaborators. At the moment, that team is not there.

A Pope who grew up in a community of friars, accustomed to discussing matters with them, is now called upon to make decisions alone. For that reason, it also seemed likely that he would bring a community of friars to the Apostolic Palace. Even so, however, the final decisions rest with him.