No commentary — my own least of all — can do complete justice to
the words of the Holy Father himself. I have therefore woven links
throughout this essay to Pope Leo’s own addresses, and gathered links to
all eight of his catecheses on Sacrosanctum Concilium
at the end, exactly as they appear on the Vatican’s website. I ask the
reader to go to the source: to read the Holy Father whole, in his own
words. What follows is offered as a companion to that reading, and never
as a substitute for it.
In the early centuries of the
Church, when the newly baptized rose dripping from the font on Easter
night, their instruction was not finished but only begun. In the days
that followed, the bishop would gather these newly baptized and lead
them back through the mysteries they had just received — the water, the
oil, the bread and the cup — unfolding what the sacred rites had worked
in them and for them. This was mystagogy: the
opening of the sacramental mysteries to those newly admitted to them. At
Jerusalem, in the very shadow of the Anastasis, the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, Saint Cyril delivered such catecheses to his neophytes in the
octave of Easter — and by God’s providence we possess them still,
luminous homilies that lead the Christian from the sign he has seen to
the grace he cannot. Ambrose did the same at Milan, Chrysostom for his own neophytes
and Augustine in his Cathedral in Hippo. It was the golden age of the
mystagogue: the bishop as the one who takes the faithful by the hand and
walks them into the holy of holies.
Across these past
months, Pope Leo XIV has taken up that same ancient office — only now
the neophytes are the whole Church, the newly baptized and the long
baptized alike. In an age that has largely lost the capacity to read its
own rites, that stands before sign and symbol — as Romano Guardini
lamented, and as Leo himself would recall — no longer knowing how to
see, the universal pastor has become mystagogue to all the faithful,
opening the riches of the sacred liturgy. He has done it not as a
scholar defending a thesis, nor as a partisan in a quarrel, but as a
father leading his children deeper into the mystery that feeds them.
This is the pope’s pivotal office as teacher: not to win an argument,
but to open a door.
