In 2023, shortly after then Archbishop Robert Prevost had been appointed by Pope Francis as the new prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, he sat down for an interview with Vatican News. The questions focused mostly on the nature of the office and the qualities of bishops, as he was now the principal advisor to the pope for their appointments. In doing so, he gave insight into his views on the nature of the church and church leaders.

Prevost’s answers echoed many of the themes set out by Francis during his papacy, especially the servant nature of both the church and its various clergy. Speaking of bishops in particular, Prevost rejects the image of them as “ruler” of those in their charge.

A fundamental element of the portrait of a bishop is being a pastor, capable of being close to the members of the community, starting with the priests for whom the bishop is father and brother. To live this closeness to all, without excluding anyone…. One must not give in to the temptation to live isolated, separated in a palace…. And we must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today. The authority we have is to serve, to accompany priests, to be pastors and teachers.

Such a “job description” certainly does not fit the autocratic methods, regalia, and fawning ring kissing that so often characterized bishops of the past, and perhaps more than a few yet today. The future Pope Leo then makes a fascinating statement about the purpose of the church and ministry generally.

We are often preoccupied with teaching doctrine, the way of living our faith, but we risk forgetting that our first task is to teach what it means to know Jesus Christ and to bear witness to our closeness to the Lord. This comes first: to communicate the beauty of the faith, the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus. It means that we ourselves are living it and sharing this experience. (emphasis added)

Here again we hear echoes of Pope Francis, yet language like “beauty and joy of knowing Jesus” seems to come genuinely from Prevost’s own heart. Like Francis, such thoughts certainly point away from a church preoccupied with obedience and rule keeping. These will not come as welcome words for the conservatives hoping to return the church to its pre-Vatican II days.

One picture of Prevost that has surfaced since his election is of him singing with a group of his fellow high school students (see the top of this post). It immediately brought back memories for me. The new pope is just a few months older than I am and we grew up just a few miles apart. (Our times in seminary also overlapped and his school was less than a mile from mine, both in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.) This picture made me realize that we both had been shaped by the “folk mass” tradition of the 1960s and 70s.

The sentiment of “the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus” would have fit right in with the songs and liturgy of the folk services of that time. Most congregations (from what I could tell) welcomed the sight of teens and young adults helping lead worship, even if it was with guitars and tambourines instead of an organ, and the music was nothing like what they had grown up with. It was a heady time, and somehow the ancient church almost seemed cool. But when Prevost and I were in high school, that movement was already peaking and would soon fade away.

The Woodstock generation was growing up and, in any case, their elders were growing fed up with them. The Vietnam War, Kent State, Watergate, the Oil Embargo, and the Hostage Crisis all cast a pall over Middle America. Inflation, followed by record high interest rates and the growth of the “rust belt”, left many pining for earlier times, even if the memory of them was selective and romanticized. Then two leaders arose to try to bring about such desires: a new pope, John Paul II in 1978, and a new president, Ronald Reagan, in 1980.

By then, the folk masses (or in our Protestant case, the Chicago Folk Service) had largely disappeared or, where still offered, felt increasingly anachronistic. I won’t go into the politics of the time but it was the same impulse that led to both JP II and Reagan: reign in the craziness of the 60s and bring back the good old days. It says something important that that impulse is still with us today: both that after nearly a half-century its goals still haven’t been achieved and, therefore, however justified, that it’s been barking up the wrong tree.

The end of the folk mass movement was also the end of language like “the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus.” To hear such words from Prevost was for me a step back in time. Of course, it never rolled off the tongues of our elders. Yet I can say that, however naïve and even cloying such language may have been at the time, there was a genuine sincerity in it for the teens and young adults in the church. Books like J. B. Philips’ Your God Is Too Small, the Good News Bible, and The Gospel According to Peanuts, had made Jesus cool, and by association, the church that claimed to represent him. But a cool Jesus wasn’t really what the church wanted, and so he disappeared.

Prevost is no aging hippy, however, and he seems to be a very smart man. So, to speak now of “the joy of knowing Jesus” is more than nostalgia or sentimentality. I hope I am not giving him more credit than he deserves in thinking that this reflects his understanding of our time. The rise of the “spiritual but not religious” is an indicator of the desire of many for a genuine experience of God, the transcendent, or whatever word you want to use. In the church, one way to describe such an experience is “knowing Jesus.”

It seems, then, that it will be a priority of Pope Leo to steer the church into providing ways for people to have such experiences. That may sound easy or obvious but it is neither. The church, in all its forms, not just Roman Catholic, has been primarily about plugging people into the institution. There they would find baptisms, communion, and other ecclesiastical services, along with moral and theological guidance, i.e. interpretations of the Christian rule book. Or as Prevost says above, preoccupation “with teaching doctrine, the way of living our faith.” But instead of that, he goes on, “our first task is to teach what it means to know Jesus Christ.”

I wish Pope Leo all the best in what will certainly be a daunting task.

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