Easter eggs and tea leaves in the Augustinian pope’s Chrism Mass homily

Pope Leo XIV gave the tea leaf-readers plenty to study on Thursday morning in Rome, when he delivered his homily at the Chrism Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. He also dropped a few “Easter eggs” for the folks who know their Saint Augustine.

In order to spot the Easter eggs, though, a little context is needed.

The Chrism Mass is a special occasion celebrated annually in dioceses around the world to bless the sacred oils that will be used throughout the year for baptizing, confirming, conferring holy orders, and anointing the sick.

Potentially, the Chrism Mass is a real, “For you, I am a bishop; with you, I am a Christian,” moment for any pastor of any diocesan flock.

That potential was not lost on this year’s celebration in the Rome diocese on Thursday morning by the Augustinian pontiff.

An Easter egg hiding (in plain sight)

“We know that throughout history, mission has not infrequently been distorted by a desire for domination,” Leo said, describing the desire for domination as “entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”

Desire for domination – libido dominandi in Latin – is about as Augustinian a turn-of-phrase as one is likely to get, and it names the brokenness in human nature that will not fully heal on this side of eternity.

“Consequently,” Leo said, “it is now a priority to remember that neither in the pastoral sphere nor in the social and political spheres can good come from abuse of power.”

Pundits and Vatican watchers will no doubt make hay of the reference to “the social and political spheres” as an oblique criticism of the current U.S. administration, and I suppose that’s fair, but it arguably misses the bigger story.

With the remark, Leo is telling those with ears to hear how he intends to govern: In a word, carefully.

“The great missionaries bear witnesses to quiet, unobtrusive approaches, whose method is the sharing of life, selfless service, the renunciation of any calculated strategy, dialogue and respect,” Leo said.

“It is the way of the Incarnation,” the pontiff said, “which always takes the form of inculturation.”

“Salvation,” he said, “in fact, can only be received by each person through his or her native language.”

Wish-casters on every side of the so-called Liturgy Wars in the Catholic Church will no-doubt have something to say about that line, too, but all of them will almost certainly miss the entire point, which is that Leo is telling the clergy and faithful of Rome he is going to learn their language and govern by it.

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” is also a maxim that comes to us from Saint Augustine (through his mentor, Saint Ambrose of Milan).

Leo knows he is in Rome now, and is subtly but unmistakably communicating what to expect from him: Careful and deliberate governance within the Roman system, from a governor keenly sensible of the myriad ways in which power tends to corrupt the one who wields it.

“The Curia is the institution that preserves and transmits the historical memory of a Church, of the ministry of its bishops,” Leo told curial officials in his first formal meeting with them in May of last year.

“This is very important,” he said, because memory “is an essential element in a living organism,” a faculty “not only directed to the past,” but one that also “nourishes the present and guides the future.”

“Without memory,” Leo said, “the path is lost, it loses its sense of direction.”

To work in the Roman Curia “means to contribute to keeping the memory of the Apostolic See alive,” Leo said on that same occasion in May of last year, “so that the pope’s ministry may be implemented in the best way.”

Memory, by the way, is another quintessentially Augustinian theme (one interested readers will find developed in connection with the Leonine pontificate in this scribbler’s Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform).

An omission and a tea leaf

Regarding how Leo intends to govern, there was also one big tea leaf.

A few online reports of the homily contained mention of a line from Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in the speech – EFE’s and InfoVaticana’s among them – but it wasn’t in what Pope Leo XIV said.

A Vatican official speaking on background because he was not authorized to discuss the matter told me the Bernardin line was in the advance copy of the homily sent to journalists before the Thursday morning Mass, but Pope Leo didn’t use it when he gave the speech, so it was not in the officially published version.

I will not speculate on why Leo omitted mention of Bernardin, but I will note that Bernardin – who was archbishop of Leo’s native Chicago and a powerful and polarizing figure in the U.S. Church – left a complicated legacy that has continued to influence U.S. ecclesiastical affairs in the three decades since his death from pancreatic cancer.

Bernardin faced an abuse accusation a few years before his death in 1996 – one confirmed to be false – and at least one other many years after he died. Bernardin’s emphasis on a “consistent ethic of life” – often called the “seamless garment” – made him a lighting rod for both conservative and progressive Catholics.

Instead, Leo preferred to quote only St. Oscar Romero, the beloved martyr-bishop of San Salvador, whose lines were also in the advance copy.

“Jesus Christ helped the martyrs and, if the need arises, I shall feel him very close when I entrust my last breath to him,” Romero wrote in a diary entry mere weeks before Salvadoran soldiers gunned him down as he was saying Mass.

“[M]ore than the final moment of life,” Romero wrote, “what matters is to give him one’s whole life and to live for him”.

“It is enough for me,” Leo continued to quote Romero, “to be happy and confident, to know with certainty that in him is my life and my death; that, despite my sins, I have placed my trust in him and I shall not be disheartened, for others will continue, with greater wisdom and holiness, the work for the Church and for the homeland.”

It bears mention that the Romero quote immediately followed remarks Leo made regarding “the dramatic possibility of misunderstanding and rejection,” – emphasis in the original – strikingly portrayed in the gospel account of how the townspeople of Jesus’s hometown, Nazareth in Galilee, rejected Jesus.

“When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff,” tells the Gospel according to Luke.

“Although the liturgical reading has omitted this part,” Leo said, “what we are about to celebrate this evening calls on us not to flee, but to ‘pass through’ the trial, just as Jesus did.”

“Jesus ‘passed through the midst of them and went on his way’,” Luke reports. “The cross,” Leo said, “is part of the mission: The sending becomes more bitter and frightening, but also more freeing and transformative.”

“The imperialist occupation of the world is thus disrupted from within,” Leo said, “the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked.”

“The poor, imprisoned, rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death,” Leo continued, “yet in so doing he brings a new creation to light.”

Leo’s remark about the “imperialist occupation” of the world is more than likely to draw the attention of pundits and observers keyed into the register of a global geopolitical moment fraught with uncertainty, violence, and instability.

Leo’s Augustinian sensibility, however, takes the broad and the long view of history.

During the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday at least, and for reasons only he knows, Pope Leo XIV preferred Romero to Bernardin.

Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri