Digital Religion
This coming June 29, the annual celebration in the Catholic liturgy of the solemnity of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, pillars upon which the Church was founded in the dawn of Christianity, allows us to draw a parallel between the role these two apostles played in the early days of Christianity and the mission that the pontificates of Francis and Leo XIV have carried out over these past fifteen years, in the life of the Catholic Church in its evangelizing mission in society.
The differences in personality and vision regarding what the nascent Catholic Church should be between the apostles Peter and Paul are well documented, but what is most important is to emphasize the complementarity that, in a relationship not without tensions, as in the so-called “incident of Antioch” recounted in Galatians 2:11-14, led to a model of unity in diversity. A model in which, although they differed in execution, they converged in the nucleus of the evangelical message. A model of unity that, after two millennia, the Church continues to yearn for, urge, and seek through the task of “synodality”.
To Peter and Paul we owe it that Christianity did not become and remain, in its early years, as an irrelevant Jewish sect. Peter, as leader of the group of the Twelve, was the factor of unity and cohesion; his authority and leadership among the first Christians ensured fidelity to the teachings and to the historical experience lived with Jesus of Nazareth.
Paul, on his part, was the protagonist and representative of the expansion of Christianity, breaking down the cultural barriers of Judaism so that the Gospel, through its structure and philosophical-theological systematization and its universal missionary vision, would reach the Greek and Roman world of that time.
The experience undertaken by Peter and Paul in the first Christian communities remains current and necessary in the being and doing of the actual Catholic Church. Because we need “Peter” to maintain unity in the communion of faith and tradition. The successor of Peter prevents, at each moment in the history of the Church, the fragmentation of the Universal Church.
The witness and example of Paul, on his part, prevent the Church, today and always, from becoming self-referential and turning into “a museum without future“. It is the “Pauline and missionary principle” that impels the Church to the existential peripheries so that it reaches everyone: the light of the Gospel. It is the figure of Paul that will permanently remind the Church to live in a permanent state of evangelizing “going out”. But both Peter and Paul remind us always that the center of the Church is Jesus Christ.
The last three fifteen-year periods of human history have been years of many vertiginous changes in all areas of life in society: in the political, economic, cultural, scientific and technological areas, etc. They have been fifteen years in which Catholics and all humanity have had the guidance of two Popes: Francis and, currently, Leo XIV. Two Popes who, responding to the challenges posed by these changes, are steering the Bark of Peter among the ups and downs and uncertainties of our present history.
If the legacy of Francis (2013 – 2025) can be summed up as the Pope of a “Church going out”. Leo XIV is being profiled as the Pope of “ecclesiastical institutional consolidation” and bridge between the New World and new cultures with Roman Catholic tradition.
The pontificate of Francis “made a mess”, shook the Church and moved from moralistic stances to a language and actions of mercy and accompaniment of what he himself called the human or existential peripheries, in need of the love and light of the Gospel. Leo XIV has devoted himself, in this his first anniversary of his pontificate, to “putting the house in order”, to convert the reforming and prophetic positions of Francis into solid legal structures and institutions.
Francis preached the Church as a “field hospital” and a “theology of the people and for the People of God”, giving priority to praxis over doctrine. Leo XIV seeks an Augustinian synthesis between faith, reason and institutional order. Francis made a direct and political prophetic denunciation of world problems; Leo XIV attempts discreet diplomacy and a more academic tone.
Francis convoked the “Synod of Synodality”, as a call to all for social and political friendship based on dialogue, and to the Church to walk together, in communion and with more horizontal and less pyramidal participation. Leo XIV seeks “unity in truth” to prevent a misunderstood diversity from becoming dispersion and ruptures.
The convocation of the Franciscan Year 2026, by Leo XIV, demonstrates fidelity to the paths opened by his predecessor, while attempting to ensure that the message is built in an orderly and permanent manner. Francis united the social crisis with the environmental crisis and called for respect for and care of integral ecology, criticizing the global economic system. Leo XIV takes up the Church’s Social Doctrine, but insists that peace begins with the disarming of the heart.
We move from the Pope who deepened the “preferential option for the poor” from Puebla, coming “from the end of the world”, to the “option for communion” of a Pope who combines his background and knowledge of North American society with Latin American reality and the South, through his years of missionary experience in Peru.
Thus, Francis and Leo XIV, as in their time Peter and Paul, have been configuring the best presence of the Church before the modern world, with its postmodern challenges of polarization, truth and meaning, as well as the impact of technological advances on the human being and coexistence.
And as comparisons are simplistic, because they forget the complexity of the human being and social situations, we congratulate ourselves, pray for them and thank God for the binomial Francis – Leo XIV. Because each one, with their origins, their style, their formation and their emphases, offers the Church and the world of these days a necessary and complete response for coherence, listening and the struggle for human dignity, from the logic and criteria of the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth.
Mario J. Paredes, president of the International Academy of Catholic Leaders