In the autumn of 2024, the Cardinal who is now Pope Leo XIV sat down at a large round table inside the Vatican, discussing the challenges that face the Roman Catholic Church with a cardinal from Ethiopia, archbishops of Cameroon and Kenya, a cardinal posted in Mongolia and bishops of Texas and Liberia.
By joining them at the table there was a Catholic podcaster of Dallas; A company consultant from Melbourne, Australia; a university administrator of the Figi; And a parishioned of Myanmar, three of whom were women.
Each person at the table, clergy or secular, were granted three minutes of uninterrupted speech.
“Each voice had the same value,” said Susan Pascoe, company consultant, president of Catholic Emergency Relief Australia. He sat down at a table with the future Pope for the meetings, which often extended to 11 hours or more a day during four weeks in Rome.
Pope Francis passed to listen, guiding another participant in the meeting, Wyatt Olivas, a university student of Wyoming, to refer to the pontiff as his “beasts in Christ”.
When Pope Leo XIV came out on the balcony of the Basilica of San Pietro on Thursday and gave his first address as a pontiff, he indicated that he would continue this practice of listening closely many voices.
He asked for a “synodal church”, referring to the process of dialogue between the leader of the Church and lay people who was one of the bequests signed by Pope Francis.
Francis, in trying to democratize the Church, opened the leaders of the lay bishops, including women, who in 2023 were authorized to vote for the first time on which issues should have faced the church.
Francis did not want the policies of the Church to be decided only by the bishops in closed rooms. He wanted to open the doors to all Catholics.
The fact that the new Pope decided to mention the concept in his first address, said Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit writer and a well -known supporter of awareness raising LGBTQ Catholics. Inviting the lay people to sit down as the same as the bishops was one of the controversial moves of Pope Francis.
“So an archbishop cardinal of an ancient diocese had to listen to a 20 -year -old student of Philadelphia, and this is quite threatening for some people,” said Father Martin. “It is really important that Pope Leo embraced him.”
Mr. Olivas, a 21 -year -old school teacher and junior at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, was invited for the first time to a meeting in Rome in 2023, when he was 19 years old.
Initially, he said, he wondered if any of the church managers, in particular the high -ranking cardinals, would have taken him seriously. But at the beginning of the meetings, with rigorous rules of involvement that requires everyone to listen while others spoke, the appearance of the hierarchy broke.
“These cardinals who generally sit on their thrones,” said Olivas, “for them sitting equally with a nineteen year old and listening to me” made him feel like “we are all together”.
At the meetings during the Papacy of Francis, some division topics emerged, including the ordination of women such as Catholic deacons, the celibacy requirement for priests and the church attitude towards pairs of the same sex. Francis has requested that various study groups examine some of the most difficult issues and compilation relationships, in fact, postponing the decisions on the opportunity to change the teachings of the Church or the law on the Church.
The progressives who had great hopes that these listening sessions could lead to tangible shifts in the policy of the Church fear that the new Pope will continue along a path of “a lot of chat and very little action”, said Miriam Duignan, executive director of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research.
Some conservatives say that progressives have diverted meetings as a way to push their liberal agenda. “Synodality for some people is an ideology,” said Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a conservative cardinal from Germany.
The supporters of the process affirm that simply bringing the laity to discussions with the managers of the Church improves a transparency that previously the Church was missing.
“If you look at a country like Australia, who had a five -year investigation on sexual abuse, the notion of a culture of clericalism was part of the analysis of what was to be faced,” said Mrs. Pascoe. For too long, he said, the church was organized around a structure in which “all the authority was invested in an individual of the priest or bishop”.
Forcing the Church managers to speak seriously with the lay people, he said, the consultations inaugurated by Francis tried to introduce a “approach responsible for life and the Church”.
For Pope Leo XIV, who worked as a missionary and parish priest in Peru, listening and living among the lay people has long been a key principle of his leadership style.
In Peru, he was bishop of a rural diocese and “lived with them, not in a palace but in a simple house,” said Rev. Gilles Routchier, professor of theology at Laval University of Quebec and councilor of the Vatican meetings called by Francis.
Archbishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Bamenda, Cameroon, who sat at the same table as the future Pope Leo during the 2024 meetings, said that the man who is now Ponteff took the sessions very seriously even if occasionally he had to get agitated to face his day work by managing the Vatican office that selects and manages the global bishops.
“You could see that he appreciated everyone's contribution, and an excellent listener also presented himself,” said Archbishop Nkea Funya.
In a conversation recorded last year in an Illinois church, when it was still a cardinal, the man who is now Pope Leo explained how Francis “was looking for a way to help people understand that the Church is not Father up there on Sunday with many spectators”.
He added: “He does not remove the authority at all, if you want, or the ministry of those who are called to specific services in the Church, like a bishop or a priest. But calls the best gifts from everyone to bring them together.”
It is not yet clear whether Pope Leo will encourage consultative groups to continue talking about the most sensitive issues that the Church must face. But those who participated in the process claim that it would be difficult for him to completely crush those discussions.
Father Martin said that those who had specific pets problems necessary to understand that the process concerned more “the change of the methods with which we would be able to go on with some of these problems”.
He added that some of the topics most commonly raised by some Catholics have not necessarily resonated with the faithful all over the world.
“We also felt by people who were much more worried about migrants and refugees, for poverty, for life in countries where Catholics are minorities” than to order women or support the wishes of divorced Catholics and remarried to receive communion, said Father Martin.
“Those are a certain constellation of worries,” he added. The new Pope, he said, “must really have a much more universal vision of the Church”.
Josephine de la Bruyère Reports contributed by Rome.