Dear friends,
From the outset of this project, I have said consistently that Letters from Leo is not a political-first movement. We are formed in the faith of the apostles, and the Sunday Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.
These Sunday readings and the reflections that follow provide us with a perspective on being politically active Christians in today’s world.
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“But who do you say that I am?” — Matthew 16:15
In most Catholic parishes this morning, I suspect, the homily belonged to Peter and the papacy. That makes total sense.
Today’s Gospel carries the Magna Carta of the papacy itself: “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”
A preacher who gave his ten minutes (God-willing, no more) to the rock and the keys stayed faithful to Matthew. The Church born in that exchange has crossed two thousand years with one purpose above every other: to proclaim Jesus as the savior of the world.
I must admit: I expected the Successor of St. Peter to spend today’s Angelus talking about Peter and the papacy in the life of the Church. But Leo gave his own ministry barely a sentence. The address he delivered was about our vocation.
Here’s what happens in today’s Gospel, how Leo XIV interpreted it, and why it matters to us today:
Matthew sets the scene at Caesarea Philippi, twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee, in a city renamed to flatter the emperor. Peter stands beside a sanctuary where the Roman emperor was honored as a son of God. And there, of all places, he has the audacity to call Jesus the Son of God.
It was a declaration of Jesus’s divinity, yes, but it was also a shot across the bow at the evil and excesses of the Roman Empire.
This rich Roman emperor isn’t the Son of God. The poor Jewish carpenter is the true Messiah.
The first question Jesus puts to them costs the disciples nothing; it only asks for gossip. Who do people say that the Son of Man is? They pass along the street talk: John the Baptist back from the dead, or Elijah, or Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. The company is flattering, and every man on the list is dead.
Then Jesus asks the much harder question: “But who do you say that I am?”
It’s easy to hear remnants of Moses lurking underneath that question.
At the burning bush, Moses asked God for a name, and what he received was a flat-out refusal to be named: “I am who I am.”
The God of Exodus would not sit still for a static definition. The echo feels deliberate to me; the “I am” at the center of Jesus’s question carries the untamable weight of the name revealed in the desert.
During my trip to Rome, I stood on the ground where Nero’s circus once stood and where tradition holds that Peter was crucified upside down.
Peter’s proclamation was an attempt to turn the world upside down, but it didn’t come without consequences. The powers that be chose to silence him. But the men who murdered Peter have no empire and no successor. Peter does. There is nothing soft about the love of God; it carries a power beyond measure.
It’ll outlast every empire and every regime, including our own. Thank God for that.
