In the blue afternoon the bird appeared, perched on a high roof in the capital of the world. It was a seagull, dancing in the sun. Perhaps it felt lonely, for it was soon joined by its mate and their hungry offspring. Indifferent to the cheers below them in the ruined circus and to the old men who lurked in the gilded ossuary chattering and marking bits of paper destined for oblivion, the mother spat out the corpse of a rodent, which the chick happily devoured. Then the smoke appeared, a burst of shocking white. The bells sounded.
Like goodness knows how many millions of Catholics, my family and I watched these images, which presaged the election of Robert Cardinal Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, in a spirit of half-conscious augury. I realized almost immediately that they had something of the quality of a beast fable or one of Wilde’s modern “fairy tales,” such as The Happy Prince. They are also not without precedent in ecclesiastical history; as readers of Eusebius know, Pope Fabian was elected after “a dove suddenly flying down from on high, sat upon his head.” While this does not seem to have repeated itself literally in the case of Pope Leo’s election, one can never be sure (at least not without asking, say, Cardinal Dolan to commit a serious canonical crime). The question of the rat’s allegorical identity is a more interesting one, upon which I suspect I shall find myself meditating for some time.
In common with many of my readers, I knew very little about Pope Leo before the result of the conclave was announced. Even now I know only that he is an American, born in Chicago, a religious who attended minor seminary in (of all places) my own humble diocese, and that much of his career was spent in missionary work before he received the curial appointment in 2022 to which he would seem to owe his election. (I now find myself entertaining the pleasing notion that the strange name of “Kalamazoo” will at least merit a footnote in the pages of some future Gibbon.) But I do know that after a long afternoon of quiet brooding and a longer evening of fevered conversation and intermittent prayer, I awoke this morning feeling absurdly, almost childishly happy. I suspect that this experience is a common one, and that my sense of relief, like the lifting of some enormous, half-remembered burden, will also be widely shared.
Let us all pray for Leo, our pope.
