Many years ago, when I was a novice, I received classes in the history of the consecrated religious life from an older sister. Over the course of those classes, she introduced me to a range of historical figures to help me chart the growth of the religious life from its origins in the early Church through its development in subsequent centuries. We learned about eremites and cenobites, monastics and mendicants, founders and reformers. Then, when we reached the twentieth century, my sister introduced me to another, lesser-known, but arguably no less interesting figure of Church history: her Aunt Odile.

Why? Because one night in the mid-1960s, when Aunt Odile was a young woman working in Paris, she met a man in a nightclub. He was a lot older than her, but they got on well and spent the next few hours talking and dancing together. In the early hours of the morning, when she was ready to go home, Aunt Odile asked the man who he was. “Well, up until yesterday I was the abbot of a Benedictine monastery,” he replied. “And tomorrow . . . who knows?”

The story of Aunt Odile getting hit on in a Paris nightclub by a monk is, understandably, now a cherished part of family lore: a story relayed to grandchildren at Christmases and cousinades to pithily illustrate what the older generation got up to in the swinging Sixties. But for my sister, tasked with drawing up a program of formation for historically illiterate novices such as myself, it also had something highly important to tell us all about the consecrated religious life in the modern era. After all, if I could give the beginnings of an explanation as to how Aunt Odile, an apparently inconsequential figure in ecclesiastical history, could end up dancing the night away with a Benedictine abbot before the decade of the Second Vatican Council was out—if, in other words, I could delineate the events in the Church, the movements in society, and the trends in Catholic intellectualism which led both Aunt Odile and the abbot to this point—then I would have demonstrated to my sister that I understood most, if not all, of the key historical and intellectual factors influencing the development of the consecrated religious life in the twentieth century West. The very public identity crisis which beset Aunt Odile’s dancing abbot was by no means a unique or singular event.

But I could also use the night of Aunt Odile’s dance with the abbot as a starting-point to travel forwards in Church history. The shock and bafflement which I and most other practicing Catholics feel on hearing the story of the runaway abbot, a man who had abandoned centuries of monastic patrimony seemingly overnight, helps us to appreciate at least some of the reasons for the growth in new ecclesiastical communities in the later twentieth century. These communities—vibrant, dynamic, and often headed by an influential and charismatic founder—provided the attractive witness to Gospel living that older religious communities now seemed unwilling or unable to provide. Unless we know something of the self-evisceration of established religious communities in this period of Church history, the growth of these new communities makes little to no sense.

But then, as we move yet further forward along the timeline, we discover something else: the scandalous and horrifying falls from grace of many of these communities’ founders, and the Church’s growing realization that her abuse crisis encompasses not only sexual violence against minors but also psychological and spiritual manipulation of adults within both religious and lay communities. We discover too that contemporary Church scandals apparently unrelated to this history, such as the cases of Marko Rupnik and of Jean Vanier, in fact are impossible to understand apart from it. And once I have completed my historical timeline, spread both backwards and forwards from Aunt Odile’s night of dancing with the abbot, one thing should have become very clear: it is impossible to have any thorough understanding of the Church in the twentieth century without also understanding a little of what has happened, and continues to happen, in Her convents and monasteries.

This month, the Internet has been flooded with analysis of Pope Leo XIV’s first year in office. What do we now know about the Supreme Pontiff, about his strengths and weaknesses, about where his pontificate might take the Church next? To me, one of the most important things we know about our new Pope is to be found concealed in a section of his preaching corpus that receives relatively little public attention: his addresses to religious communities. These are not just vague, pious exhortations of the type that bishops can (and often do) easily get away with giving to monks and nuns. Instead, they are precise and knowledgeable exhortations to re-examine commitment to the Rule and the foundational charism, to take seriously the role of the Chapter and of both initial and ongoing formation, and to revisit guiding magisterial texts such as Perfectae caritatis.

Whether he is addressing Augustinians or Benedictines, Legionaries of Christ or Servants of Mary, it is clear that the Pope has a solid confidence in one of the most fundamental truths of the religious life: that a community will see no true spiritual growth and bear no true spiritual fruit unless it remains diligently attentive to the laws and the system of governance which protect it against corruption and abuse of power.

The health and vitality of the consecrated religious life has a significance that spreads far beyond the convent walls—further, even, than the walls of Parisian nightclubs. There are many reasons to consider Pope Leo XIV to be a Pope who governs prudently and effectively. But one of the least appreciated or understood of those reasons is his obvious grasp of the religious life, with its power to bring about great good but also great harm in the life of the Church.