A Pastor’s Thoughts: ‘He speaks Italian like an American’

By Fr. Jim Muscatella, Blessed Trinity and St. Patrick’s Parishes — 

Fr. Aaron Kelly and I are catching up over lunch. After celebrating Mass together, we were still in our collars and clerical blacks out in the city. No one, I’m sure, would be surprised to overhear those two young priests that sunny afternoon – we were talking about the new Pope.

With a beaming smile, Fr. Kelly continued, “He uses American turns of phrase and just says them in Italian!” 

Leo XIV, the first North American-born Pope, has captivated the world in these few short weeks. On May 8, wearing a shy smile and overcome with emotion, our new Pope greeted the world for the first time from that illustrious Vatican balcony as the successor of St. Peter. 

“I am Roman,” was his proud announcement during those earliest days. 

On one hand, this is entirely true – the Pope has always been the Bishop of Rome, so in a special way, Leo had become Roman. At the same time, however, Leo XIV is still the man who was born in Chicago and raised in Dolton, its suburb. 

The story of “Fr. Bob from Chicago,” from his earliest days to his time as a missionary bishop in Peru, has not been erased or replaced in his personality. The entirety of the life of Robert Prevost has instead been taken up into the personality of Leo XIV. Everything, especially those life experiences that formed the way Leo thinks and speaks, will become an integral and integrated part of this new Pope’s preaching – God, in His Providence, has desired that the good news of Jesus Christ should resound through the world in the resonant tones of a Chicago accent. This is how the grace of God works.

This has always been how the grace of God works – this is how God gives the gift of His very own life to men. God does not stand at a distance from His creation. He does not merely condone or condemn the world by a cold, dictated word uttered from afar. Instead, The Word, Jesus Christ, who is God, was sent into the very midst of the world to transform by His human touch what had become deformed. Even more wonderfully, He raises up the lives of the very same men He lovingly comes to save.

The grace of God does not come as a mere covering, like a mask or a costume we are meant to put on so that the old, unworthy man might be hidden away. Sometimes we might think this is what it means to be holy – to become something utterly different, alien, and almost disconnected from what we once were. If we see the former man, our very selves and stories, as shameful beyond reckoning, we might even want a mask and a covering – but this is not the way God works, because this is not how the God who made us sees us.

The God who doesn’t need anything outside of Himself for any reason is delighted to give us our lives so that He could share His life with us. He has always wanted our stories to have a share in His own glorious story. Our lives, the whole story of our true, human lives, are brought to goodness and holiness as He brings Himself near to us. Even as we misstep in sin, God steps up to meet us and turn our faltering misdeeds into a march of His triumph – so that we might walk alongside Him and so know and speak with true Holiness.

Matthew, desperately ostracized from his own people as a traitor, is called by Christ as a friend. From the strength of that friendship, Matthew writes his Gospel as a letter of hope to his own despairing people – God has come to walk alongside them. Mark, recounting St. Peter’s retelling reads like a rough-and-tumble fisherman’s tale – vases are shattered, Jesus spits, and the veil is torn. Luke, the gentle physician, looks in wonder at the Lord’s tenderness to the afflicted, stricken, and lowly. Each speaks, by God’s grace and design, with the true accent of these men – and God still delights when His good news is spoken in our accents.