Pope Leo on leading the sheep to safety

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 12, 2025

Yesterday (September 11, 2025), Pope Leo held an audience with bishops who had been ordained during the last year, some 200 present in all. It is very much worth taking note of what he emphasized, especially since, on the same day, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg made a point of saying in an interview that he “would not define morality—especially sexual morality—as narrowly as the Church does today”.

This is the same Cardinal who a few years ago insisted that the Church needed to change her teaching against homosexuality, and was soon after named as relator general of the Synod on Synodality by Pope Francis. So the casual observer naturally wonders if Francis and Cardinal Hollerich were in alignment and, if so, whether the same is true of Pope Leo.

After all, in one sense, Pope Leo took a page from his predecessor’s book in addressing the new bishops. He urged them “always to keep watch and to walk in humility and prayer, to make yourselves servants of the people to whom the Lord sends you.” Right away, then, one might think (in a very contemporary sense of the term “servant”) that Leo wants bishops to bend over backwards, or become contortionists just like Cardinal Hollerich, in order to accommodate all those who insist that the Church must not attempt to maintain her own narrow definition of sexual morality in the face of those who reject it.

But not so fast: Leo immediately pressed on to emphasize precisely what his predecessor (who had rewarded Cardinal Hollerich) so consistently avoided:

At the same time, today we must ask ourselves what it means to be servants to the faith of the people. However important and necessary it may be, it is not enough to be aware that our ministry is rooted in the spirit of service, in the image of Christ. Indeed, it must also be translated into the style of the apostolate, into the various forms of pastoral care and governance, into the yearning to proclaim the Gospel in ways that are as diverse and creative as the real situations you will encounter.

But let us suppose this paragraph is still subject to dubious interpretation. In that case it is useful to quote the next point that Leo made: “The crisis of faith and its transmission, together with the hardships related to ecclesial belonging and practice, invite us to rediscover the passion and courage for a new proclamation of the Gospel.” Among the particular problems he mentioned by name are “the ethical challenges that question us on the value of life and freedom”. And “in this context”, Pope Leo emphasized, “the Church sends you as caring, attentive pastors…pastors who wish to be guides, fathers and brothers for the priest and for sisters and brothers in the faith.”

Yes, Pope Leo XIV did say “guides”.

A significant shift?

Hardships related to ecclesial belonging and practice…passion and courage for the Gospel…ethical challenges for pastors who wish to be guides. This is not quite the same emphasis that was so characteristic of Pope Francis, who focused on shepherds who accompany their sheep to the point of acquiring their smell. It remains to be seen what, if any, concrete steps Pope Leo will take to redirect a Church which has been forced to take its cues from a largely disastrous pope for the past dozen years. Serving as Pope is obviously a gargantuan task. The charisms of each and every successor of Peter are different. But we can at least broadly enumerate a few basic steps that must clearly be part of any authentic renewal:

• Replacing some of those in key positions with others who are willing to emphasize unpopular truths (perhaps beginning with a very simple change to the editorial leadership of L’Osservatore Romano, which would be a fairly quick and painless way to signal a new tone and a new agenda).
• Either removing the synodality train from service or giving synodality a clear destination in terms of authentic Catholic renewal instead of endless listening and sharing along the way to nowhere. To change the metaphor, the expression “fish or cut bait” comes to mind, since we are actually speaking of fishing for men.
• Running a tighter ship overall, so that there is a far greater emphasis on fidelity to what the Church teaches and accountability for how the Church’s resources are used.
• Refocusing on what it means for Catholics to be the salt of the earth who must not allow that salt to lose its savor. Perhaps it is helpful to recall that salt not only enhances authentic flavors but preserves by reducing a food’s unbound water—which is where all those unwanted microbes grow.

And finally, a hint: The apostles made an important point when they declared: “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.” They appointed others to this duty so that they could devote themselves “to prayer and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:2-4). And neither did they presume to redefine the Word so it would not be so challenging, in accordance with their own ideas on how to make it more palatable to the world. The apostles knew that the word of God was not only good but the standard by which every other alleged good must be judged.

The emphasis in his message to new bishops indicates that Pope Leo’s understanding of the total Catholic mission includes at its very core the proclamation and implementation of the entire gospel—precisely so that as much as possible of the human race might be preserved through a supernatural salt which has not had its savor destroyed by men. Such an emphasis further suggests that, if the Church does not do this, she is not really serving the gospel at all. It is not only that bishops and priests must get close enough to take on the smell of the sheep, as Pope Francis so colorfully expressed it. More fundamentally, Pope Leo seems to suggest that bishops and priests must actually care enough about the sheep to lead them to safety.

We do not need more photo ops for a rather smelly form of interaction. The wolves are already in too many of the snapshots. If the close presence of the wolves is not the most important sign of our times—if this presence is not still the greatest danger to which Pope Leo and all the rest of us must respond in the course of this very pontificate—then I cannot imagine what is. Sometimes it is not just a matter of leading the flock to the sheepfold. Sometimes it is a matter of making the sheepfold safe.

It remains to be seen what God has in store for His people in this pontificate. In a Rome-as-Kansas-City situation in which “everything is up to date” and “they’ve gone about as far as they can go”¹, almost anything that Pope Leo is or does now will seem like an improvement. But he may actually have just given us the single most important meditation point for the foreseeable future: “The crisis of faith and its transmission, together with the hardships related to ecclesial belonging and practice, invite us to rediscover the passion and courage for a new proclamation of the Gospel.”

---

¹ From the song “Kansas City” in Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma!