marble womb
on watching a pope becoming
The minutes between the curtains of white smoke curling out of the Sistine Chapel chimney and the cardinal deacon stepping out onto St. Peter’s balcony to announce the new successor of Peter are what history feels like.
A few tens of thousands of people are in the same square as you, all engaged in the most transcendent human experience of waiting. You were all holding vigil, of course, often for hours before the white smoke came, but the white smoke changed the nature of your waiting. Before, you were waiting for an uncertain event: will A happen or B happen? It’s exciting and feels rooted in a rich meaning and tradition, but it feels much like the uncertainty that marks most of our waking hours.
But once the smoke has revealed itself as either black or white, there’s a resolution to that uncertain waiting. The black smoke is a bit of a resolution—you are released from this heightened state of attention, resetting the clock until we do this all again a few hours later. You are no longer spellbound by the supernatural, you step back into ordinary life. History is for another day.
But the white smoke signals that this extraordinary moment is extended. Instead of sending you back to daily life, it pushes you forward. History is moving: something extraordinary is happening here, the sort of divine moment like birthing or dying; something is being created, something new is happening. The world is going to be changed by the fingerprint of whatever is happening now to one small human.
The cheers, the cries of Viva El Papa, the burst of joy throughout the whole crowd—and through the invisible billions watching the events across the world—must be audible from space: a moment marked by a permanent wave of joy, joining all the ancient ripples from the Big Bang slowly traversing the universe.
And then, the laughter—a relief of the tension—delight. A young man kisses everyone on the cheek. Singing, flag-waving. Marching bands materialize out of the pavement, it seems.
As we wait, I pray. It feels necessary, essential. Somewhere, on the other side of all that marble, a man is putting on white garments whose weight must be like lead. What must he be thinking? Feeling? Who is he, being made inside that marble womb? We will meet him soon, never do you have so much certainty in life. That, in sixty minutes, give or take a few, a person who woke up this morning not the pope will be transformed into the Bishop of Rome who is also the shepherd of a global church. What does it mean to become a pope? The voting is done, but the transformation is happening as we wait, barely breathing.
After what seems like ages, but is really under an hour, Cardinal Deacon Mamberti appears on the balcony. Glenn Beck, watching across the ocean, thinks he is the pope. I’m sure many people do to—with all the scarlet and lace, well, the mistake is understandable.
He announces—in defiance of everyone’s predictions and wishcasting over the past couple of weeks, the assured pronouncements of which papabile it will be and how—that an American is pope: Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost. And his name will be Pope Leo XIV.
What? Seems to be the general response. After we had just been saying this could never happen? Here it is, happening? Plenty of Americans in the square are exuberant; plenty others are embarrassed. It feels a bit gauche, really. After we were just speaking English loudly among the Italians and the Latin American nuns, with all the class of conquerors. It’s like the answer to a bad riddle: What to give the country that has everything? The papacy, obviously.
And Pope Leo XIV! What a mysterious name. After our biblical turn of Johns and Pauls, the ancient saints of Francis and Benedict. Leo is a distinctly Roman, distinctly papal name: saint Leo the Great, a pope, a pope who saved Rome. The name does not inspire the instant adoration and simplicity of Franciscus—Francis of Assisi is perhaps the most beloved saint across the global north. Leo. Leo is a name that identifies itself with the office he takes. That’s what’s in a name.
I don’t know what to think. The expat I am with and I shriek when we hear the news. It seems impossible, a dissociative dream. After we had just been saying this could never happen—here it is, happening.
And then he steps out. The iPhones are lifted into the air, everyone is trying to capture the moment. I have decided I will watch it with my own eyes. I was in the square on St. Peter’s Basilica when Pope Francis was elected, and I did not have a smartphone in 2013. Many fewer people did. I have very few pictures from my time in Rome, but that hasn’t impacted my ability to remember it. I want to remember his arrival, too. I have decided to record it, the shrieks of the crowd blowing out the microphones of my Tascam.
Who is he? Who is he? What can you know of someone from their face at the moment they have stepped out onto the balcony and become pope? He says: “Peace be with you all!” And the crowd applauds.
My heart sinks.
It did not take long for the media coverage to turn Pope Francis into a political figure. It wasn’t long until people I loved were angry at the pope, disagreeing with him, picking fights with what he said or did. Slowly, over those excruciating years leading up to the first Trump presidency, so many American Catholics developed a new moral standard: everything that supported casting their lot in with Trump was good, everything that challenged it was bad.
But I remember the first time I heard someone speak negatively about Pope Francis, I thought: How could you do that?
I felt an inveterate sense of love and responsibility for Pope Francis that I think originated in that first moment we saw him walk out on the balcony into the dark of St. Peter’s Square, blessing the people gathered and the world. When you see a child take their first steps, do you ever feel anything for them but love? You held their hands as they became who they are.
Francis was truly a lightning bolt. He was Ignatian. And he was hated for the same reasons that the Society of Jesus has always been hated: too wild, too bold, too unafraid to embrace the God in the world around them, the God who says, “see, I am doing a new thing.” New things sometimes make strange bedfellows with the old.
As soon as Francis walked out on that balcony in 2013 (I was young, I was innocent, what did I know? Perhaps whatever impression he had left would have felt extraordinary) the crowd under their umbrellas could feel the fingerprint of history: see, I am doing a new thing. He was Francis. He was singular and extraordinary, and he knew his vocation and articulated the papacy within it.
As Pope Leo XIV began to speak, I missed Francis with a new clarity. The sheep are in desperate need of a shepherd: not just any shepherd, a good shepherd, who smells like his sheep. How rare they are. This particular good shepherd of Francis is gone and we will look for him, as Benedict XVI said, but not find him. For we will always have such need of him.
But, then, this new, unknown pope said Francis’ name, invoking the final moment of Francis’ papacy in the first moment of his.
“We still keep in our ears that weak but ever courageous voice of Pope Francis blessing Rome! The Pope who blessed Rome gave his blessing to the world, to the entire world, that morning of Easter Day. Allow me to follow up on that same blessing: God loves us,” he said.
He misses him too, I realized.
Later, I learned that there is another Leo, not a pope—Brother Leo, the Franciscan friar who was the companion of Francis during his dying days. It was to Brother Leo that Francis of Assisi said the words Dorothy Day was so fond of quoting in a particularly trying moment: “This, then, is perfect joy.”
Thanks to Pope Francis! Leo says, and the whole crowd cheers. How can heartbreak and joy live in such harmony with one another?
The camera zooms in on Leo XIV’s face, with a few hard swallows, gulping down whatever emotion a new pope must be feeling. Terror? Awe? Is something happening inside of him or around him that he does not understand, or, even worse, he does? He seems a bit awkward as 150,000 people cheer for him. It must be a bit awkward, them grabbing at your cloak, begging to be healed, when you are just a man like them. But where else are they to go?
And it occurs to me that something is happening that would not happen without us. “No one can fulfill their vocations without the other vocations,” Cardinal Czerny tells me later. To become a pope is an identity that is formed with the other 1.6 billion Catholics around the globe. A shepherd is nothing without his sheep. And so, he needs us, standing on that balcony, walking through rituals milennia in the making, helping a mere man named Bob from Chicago walk through the thick red curtains and become a pope, expanding our sense of what meaning is possible for a human being to hold, the responsibility they can take on, imagine committing yourself to a life of service and then becoming the servant to all the servants of God? Tis a consummation I think no sane person would devoutly wish.
Although he does not ask for our blessing, as Pope Francis did, I still feel our hands reaching out toward him. The cheers of encouragement, the prayers, the joy, rising like the white smoke, buoying him up. I hope he feels it. I am reminded of being present for a death or a birth: these are moments that seem like inevitabilities, out of our control, in the hands of the living God. But we are God’s hands and feet. And how we arrive to this moment, what we bring to this moment will transform what the moment means for the person entering this world or the next.
He says we will build bridges, we will be synodal, we will listen, we will always seek peace and we will not be afraid. When he says synodal, my heart expands three sizes. This is a man who does not just say “walking together” but really walks the walking together. And he is addressing the particular people here, but he is also addressing the people he loves in Peru, 11,000 miles away
Leo, the new pope, waves to us and goes inside. Will he get any rest, I wonder? Will he go to sleep soon? What does a pope do as he is becoming pope? Some of this is like a chrysalis, it happens in the sacred silence of the human heart, where God acts. You can never see the transformation, only the end result, wings dripping, beating, taking flight. Perhaps we just witnessed it—that first flight. It was tender, delicate, that address to the square—vulnerable—wings are easily crushed.
What do most people think of when they hear the name Leo XIV? Leo XIII, of course. And I think of how he was elected one week before the 134th anniversary of the encyclical that Leo XIII pubished, Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things,” which launched an new response of the Church to the problems of the modern world, a movement that led directly to Peter Maurin knocking on Dorothy Day’s door and launching the newspaper that changed my own life.
See, I am doing a new thing after all.
