William Temple Foundation

It might be said that Pope Leo XIV has tough acts to follow in Pope Francis, in Pope Leo XIII, the architect of Catholic Social Thinking/Teaching, and indeed in all the Popes going back to St Peter. Or we could say that he has some inspirational predecessors.

There have been beautiful messages and prayers from the Church of England, other denominations, other faiths and other world leaders, but also from people all over the globe, including the peripheries. Lay Catholics are touched by our friends of other religious backgrounds and those without any religious beliefs who have commented with such grace on the example of Pope Francis and now on the election of Pope Leo XIV. 

There has also been generous coverage in the secular media of Rome for the death and funeral of Pope Francis, for the Conclave and for Pope Leo, with commentators often pointing out that the late Pope Francis had declared 2025 to be a Jubilee Year with the theme of ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. Even more than usual, a side-benefit of this has been the ease of finding pilgrims from all over the world ready to share with broadcasters their love of the Popes. The media have also seen significance in Pope Francis dying at Easter and in Pope Leo from the Americas being chosen in Europe on VE Day. 

In the abstract, people who are against the papacy tend to focus on infallibility. In the real life persons of actual Popes, however, people often warm to the attitudes of Popes to fallibility, to their own shortcomings and to the compassion they show for the rest of us who are also in need of mercy and grace. 

Pope Francis taught us not only in his real life but in the reality of the manner of his dying. Now, in death, he has been praised for his appointment less than two years ago of Pope Leo as a Cardinal and as the head of the dicastery which recommends to the Pope the appointments of bishops all around the world.

The new Pope’s initial words have been about peace and bridges, as befits the Pontifex, which is Latin for bridge-builder. He has been described repeatedly as a reconciler and messages from other denominations have called for him to exercise a ministry of reconciliation. 

The William Temple Foundation is one of many institutions to discern in the choice of name of Leo an indication of the new Pope’s commitment to social Justice. Leo XIII’s famous Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, from the 1890s, sets out Catholic Social Teaching. Leo XIII was influenced in this by Cardinal Manning, who was born in the first decade of the nineteenth century and who died in its last decade. Some seventy years before William Temple, William Beveridge and R H Tawney were students together at Balliol College, Oxford, Manning studied there. He was a married Anglican priest whose wife died. He became a Catholic in the 1850s, then a Catholic priest, Archbishop of Westminster and eventually a Cardinal. He is credited with resolving the dockers’ strike and his funeral brought people out onto the streets of London out of respect for his community engagement. The social justice agendas of Temple, Beveridge, Tawney, Leo XIII and Manning were closely aligned and transformative in the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. There is much to ponder, as the pontificate of Leo XIV takes us towards the middle of the twenty-first century, in the wisdom and practical achievements of this quintet of Anglicans, Catholics and, in Beveridge, a respectful non-believer.  

Before concluding with some thoughts on reconciliation, I pause to answer readers of my last blog, on the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, who have been asking me about Sr Philomena Doherty, a former chaplain of Liverpool Hope University, whom I mentioned had died on Good Friday. Sr Phil’s funeral took place today in Southport. The Requiem Mass was celebrated beautifully in the Birkdale Convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame by her fellow chaplain and great friend, Fr Peter Hannah. When my middle brother (Mgr Canon) Martin died a couple of years ago, our sister Mary found in his room a letter from Fr Peter Hannah. They had never met but Fr Peter had been praying for Martin for over twenty years, since learning that Martin was suffering from Parkinson’s. There were wonderful vignettes at today’s funeral of Sr Philomena as someone who had a way of listening and affirming. The phrase ‘She was only 88’ makes sense, given that one of the mourners, a former governor of Liverpool Hope, Sr Susan Mary Waters is 101 yet does not seem to have aged in the last thirty years. Pope Leo XIV is ‘only’ 69. Sr Phil and Fr Peter were a wonderful duo within the ecumenical chaplaincy team at Hope because of this gift of placing others first.

This brings me to Albino Luciani, the Patriarch of Venice, who was made a cardinal in 1973 by Pope Paul VI, and went on to succeed him as Pope John Paul I in 1978, only to die a month later. When made a Cardinal, he was in the middle of his teaching ministry through writing a series of imaginary letters to famous figures from history and literature. These were initially written for a Catholic journal but were later collated and published as a book under the title Illustrissimi. 

In September 1973, for example, he wrote a letter to Casella, a musician and friend of Dante. Dante imagined encountering Casella some time after his death, still outside Purgatory and asking why Casella has not been admitted yet. Casella says the angel-boatman had not chosen him until Pope Boniface declared a Year of Jubilee in the year 1300, at which point the angel would take all-comers. Meanwhile, on Earth, pilgrims were converging on Rome to celebrate this Jubilee. Boniface had thought a Jubilee should come every one hundred years but his successors as Popes soon changed this to every fifty and then every twenty-five years, so that as many pilgrims as possible could have the experience at least once in their lifetime. Luciani, later Pope John Paul I, writing in 1973 notes that Pope Paul VI had declared that the next Jubilee in 1975 would have as its theme ‘Reconciliation’. 

The message of this letter and of that Jubilee was that the world needs peace through reconciliation but the first step is to reconcile yourself from within. Luciani tells a story of a Korean general who dies, is judged and assigned to Paradise but asks St Peter if he can take a look at Hell first. It has a long table with plentiful bowls of aromatic rice between diners facing each other but the chopsticks were so long that nobody could feed themselves a single grain of rice. They all looked miserable. This was Hell. When the general got to Heaven, the scene was an identical long table with food and long chopsticks but here everyone was happy. Heaven was feeding each other: ‘each, having picked up the food with the chopsticks, raised it to the mouth of the companion opposite, and all managed splendidly. Thinking of others, instead of oneself, resolved the problem, transforming Hell into Heaven.’  

Sr Phil would have been 89 on 13^th May, which happens to be the Feast of St Julie Billiart, the foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame. Sr Phil was a Sister of Notre Dame for 64 years. That is a long time to be thinking of others but that is what it can take to be reconciled to oneself so as to be able to bring about reconciliation in and between others. 

The 80^th anniversaries of VE Day and later this year of VJ Day also have elements within them of being exercises in reconciliation. 

This sense of learning to be at ease with yourself in order to serve others as a reconciler had one other extraordinary lesson this week. We might expect Popes, Sisters, and veterans to understand the symbolism and the practice of such reconciliation but rugby players might not be your next choice of people speaking about God. Yet on being announced also on 8^th May as the captain of the 2025 British & Irish Lions for their tour of Australia this summer, Maro Itoje told the BBC about the captains’ dinner with his predecessors in these terms: ‘To be at a dinner with some of the true icons of the game and be able to break bread, talk and listen to their stories and their experiences was special.’ Maro Itoje has spent even less time as a club and country captain than Leo XIV spent as a Cardinal. 

Maro Itoje, whose first cap for the Lions was eight years ago when he was 22, was then asked if he would like to have been captain on an earlier Lions expedition, as this will be his third tour. His impeccable reply was, ‘I think God’s timing is always the best time. I’ve never felt more competent and more ready for the role as I do now’. By which he meant that he was now less focused on himself and could attend more to reconciling different characters within the team. 

In calling Sr Phil and Pope Francis home and in the call from the Cardinals of ‘Habemus Papam’ (‘We have a Pope’) in Leo XIV, whose pontificate is expected to be one of reconciliation, God’s timing is infallible.

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