✥ As we finished our Easter issue, we received the news that Pope Francis had died. Our next issue will be given over to a symposium on his life and legacy.
✥ 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 2023 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.
—Matthew Walther
✥ Our fifth anniversary is as good a time as any to restate the magazine’s principles. THE LAMPis a lay-edited Catholic magazine published six times a year. We do not adhere to a fixed editorial line; what we oppose—utilitarianism, techno-optimism, reductive accounts of human nature, attempts to sand down the crooked timber of humanity or subsume our aspirations into political, social, and economic frameworks—is more important. Like Horace Walpole, we sometimes find ourselves “drawn by some strange attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd.” The magazine could be described as “highbrow,” but the editors agree with Thomas Mallon that “the brow that’s really in danger of disappearing is the furrowed one.” Our sympathies are with the human race rather than the chatbot. Our program, to the extent that we have one, could be described as “Christian humanism,” in the tradition that runs from Erasmus to Pope Benedict XVI.
We take our inspiration from Saint John Henry Newman when he was editing the Tracts for the Times and the British Critic. There, his writers “belonged to various schools, some to none at all. The subjects are various,—classical, academical, political, critical, and artistic, as well as theological.” His editorial ideal continues to be our own:
Every one has his own taste. You object to some things, another to others. If we altered to please every one, the effect would be spoiled. They were not intended as symbols è cathedrâ, but as the expression of individual minds; and individuals, feeling strongly, while on the one hand, they are incidentally faulty in mode or language, are still peculiarly effective. No great work was done by a system; whereas systems rise out of individual exertions. . . . The very faults of an individual excite attention; he loses, but his cause (if good and he powerful-minded) gains. This is the way of things: we promote truth by a self-sacrifice.
