In Magna Carta Address, Pope Leo Calls for a Church That Washes Feet, Not Wields Power

“Let us dream of a Church that heals, not judges,” Pope Leo pleads in a sweeping homily that laid out the blueprint for his papacy.

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In a landmark homily at St. Peter’s Basilica today, Pope Leo XIV laid out exactly what kind of Catholic Church he wants to lead: one marked by radical humility, unity, and service to humanity.

“No one is called to dominate; all are called to serve,” Leo declared — words that will reverberate far beyond this Jubilee celebration and likely define his papacy’s mission.

Humility Over Pride

The scene this morning felt historic.

Under the towering canopy of Bernini, Pope Leo addressed thousands gathered for a special Jubilee Mass honoring Synod leaders — the very people working to make the Church more collaborative and inclusive at every level.

Fittingly, the pope used the occasion to deliver the Magna Carta of his pontificate.

He spoke plainly from the heart about the Church’s true nature, stripping away any pretenses of power. “The supreme rule in the Church is love,” Leo proclaimed.

In the Church, he stressed, relationships must never follow “the logic of power” (a worldly logic, as he put it) but the logic of love and service.

“No one is called to dominate; all are called to serve,” he said, in a clear rebuke to any leader or ideology that treats ministry as a means of control.

In the Church Pope Leo envisions, no one imposes personal agendas — “we must all listen to one another.”

No one is excluded or looked down upon — every member of God’s people is “called to participate.” And crucially, “no one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it, and seek it together.”

These exhortations struck a chord in a Church that has often been wounded by ego and division.

To drive the point home, Pope Leo turned to a familiar Gospel parable that had been read moments before: the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple.

The Pharisee, puffed up and self-righteous, was “obsessed with his own ego,” turning prayer into “a mirror in which he looks at and praises himself.”

Meanwhile, the despised tax collector stood in the back, beating his chest in humility, aware of his need for mercy. Leo warned that Christians can fall into the Pharisees’ trap whenever “the ego prevails over the collective,” breeding a self-righteous individualism that “turns the community into a judgmental and exclusionary place.”

The antidote, he said, is the tax collector’s attitude: honest humility and a recognition that we all need God and each other. “

With the same humility he showed, we too must recognize within the Church that we are all in need of God and of one another,” the pope explained. Only that mutual dependence and lowliness of heart can open the door to real, fraternal relationships in our parishes and communities.

Walking Together As One

Pope Leo’s homily repeatedly returned to one keyword: “together.”

In fact, he quoted his predecessor Pope Francis’s final Message for Lent, which emphatically insisted that “the Church is called to walk together, to be synodal. Christians are called to walk at the side of others, never as lone travelers.”

Leo — himself a participant and product of the global synodal process — clearly shares this vision. “Journeying together means consolidating the unity grounded in our common dignity as children of God,” Francis wrote, and Leo echoed that sentiment today.

The Holy Spirit, he said, impels believers to leave behind self-absorption and go out toward God with our brothers and sisters. In practice, this means the Church must become ever more a place of accompaniment and shared pilgrimage, not a collection of lone rangers or fiefdoms.

The pope thanked the synodal teams present — the councils, committees, and ordinary faithful who have spent the last few years listening to their neighbors’ hopes and concerns for the Church.

These groups, he noted, express what occurs within the Church when the Spirit is truly at work: people relating to one another not through power plays but through sincere dialogue, love, and service.

Leo urged them to continue helping “expand the ecclesial space” so that the Church becomes ever more collegial and welcoming.

He even invoked an ancient saint to underline this point: St. Clement of Rome, a first-century pope, who taught that “Christ belongs to those who are humble, not to those who elevate themselves above the flock.”

In other words, Jesus is on the side of the lowly. If we want to belong to Christ, pride and pomp have no place in how we “do Church.”

Unity Without Uniformity

In one of the most striking passages of the homily, Pope Leo acknowledged the real tensions that often run through Catholic life — between unity and diversity, tradition and novelty, authority and participation.

These contrasts have sometimes hardened into camps and culture wars in recent years. But Leo offered a different path forward. We shouldn’t try to “resolve them by reducing one to the other,” he said (an apparent plea not to let one faction simply triumph over the other).

Instead, the Holy Spirit can transform our tensions so that they “do not become ideological contrapositions and harmful polarizations.” The goal is not to win a battle but to allow diverse gifts to be “harmonized and oriented toward a common discernment.”

This is a deeply Augustinian vision — not surprising from our first Augustinian pope. In fact, Leo has often cited St. Augustine’s idea of unity in essentials, freedom in debatable matters, and love in all things.

Today, he put it in practical terms for a polarized Church: true discernment requires “interior freedom, humility, prayer, mutual trust, an openness to the new and a surrender to the will of God.”

It’s not about each side pushing its agenda; it’s about everyone letting the Holy Spirit lead.

“Being a synodal Church means recognizing that truth is not possessed, but sought together,” Pope Leo said, “allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love.”

In that one beautiful phrase, he captured the ethos of this synodal age — a Church restless to find God’s will together, united by love (indeed by God who is Love). It was a gentle but firm rebuke to the idea that any one clique, whether labeled “traditionalist” or “progressive,” can claim the whole truth.

Leo is calling the Church to humbly walk together in search of what God wants, rather than splintering into self-assured factions.

A Church that Serves the World

Toward the conclusion of his homily, Pope Leo XIV’s tone swelled with hope and urgency. He issued a kind of dream for the future Church — one that pointed outward with missionary humility.

“Dear friends, we must dream of and build a more humble Church,” he urged. Not a self-exalting Church like the Pharisee in the parable, “triumphant and inflated with pride,” but one that “bends down to wash the feet of humanity.”

The pope continued, we need “a Church that does not judge [others]... but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone.”

In other words, a Church with open arms and open ears — firmly grounded in God’s truth, yet never deaf to the voices of His children, however poor or hurting.

Finally, Pope Leo explicitly linked this humble interior renewal to the Church’s outward mission.

If we become a Church “attracted to Christ,” he said, we will by definition be “committed to serving the world.”

Here was the pope’s vision in plain terms: The Catholic Church exists not for its own power or comfort, but to be an instrument of love in making the world a better place.

In just a few minutes, Leo XIV delivered what felt like a mission statement for the rest of his papacy. For those of us who have been following his journey since that surprise election in May, today’s homily was a culmination of themes he’s been sounding since day one.

Today was his fullest blueprint yet of how the Church itself must change to do that: by embracing humility over hubris, listening over pronouncing, service over selfishness.

As the publisher of Letters from Leo, I found my heart burning at these words.

This is the kind of Church we believe in — and the kind of Church we are trying in our own small way to help build. Pope Leo wants a Church that is an instrument to make the world more just, more loving, and less divided.

That’s the project we’re all about here at Letters from Leo.

So, Holy Father, deal us in! We’re ready to walk together on this road.

I’ll have much more to say soon about the “synod” itself — what it is, why it’s happening, and how it fits into Leo’s plans. Consider this dispatch a real-time first draft of reflection on an extraordinary homily.

We will unpack it further and look at how these visionary words might translate into action, both in Rome and on the ground in our communities.

But one thing is already clear: Pope Leo XIV has given the Church a gift in this Magna Carta homily, a charter of humility and hope that will echo in the months and years ahead.

Letters from Leo is open to anyone who wants to be informed and inspired by our pope — and to turn that inspiration into action that leaves America and the world more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.