Rome – In the Basilica of Sant’Anselmo, Pope Leo XIV presided at Holy Mass on the 125th anniversary of the church’s dedication, founded by Leo XIII as the heart of the renewed Benedictine presence in Rome and throughout the world. The celebration, animated by the monks with Gregorian chant, offered one of the most intense moments of these first six months of the pontificate: a solemn yet essential liturgy, marked by the Pope’s evident familiarity with monastic spirituality, a familiarity that has long shaped both his interior life and his magisterium. During the celebration, he was seen smiling several times, almost with quiet delight—a clear sign of deep consonance with a world shaped by silence, prayer, and liturgical wisdom. Many Benedictine abbots from different countries were present; among them Dom Geoffroy Kemlin OSB, Abbot of Solesmes, a young yet authoritative figure whose balance and fidelity to tradition have revitalized the French abbey, a major reference point for Catholic liturgy. Abbot Kemlin travelled to Rome specifically to concelebrate with the Pope in his capacity as President of the Congregation of France. After Mass, Leo XIV spent time with the monks. He visited the Primatial Abbey, listened to the account of their daily life, expressed gratitude for their care of the liturgy and for preserving the Gregorian tradition, and—in a gesture both human and theological—asked them to pray for him.
Leo XIV: Monasticism as the Beating Heart of the Church
In his homily, the Pope offered a theologically rich reflection centered on the ecclesial meaning of monasticism and on the bond between liturgy, contemplation, and mission. Beginning with the Gospel verse, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church” (Mt 16:18), Leo XIV reread the history of Sant’Anselmo as a parable of the universal Church: a house built on rock, where prayer becomes architecture and unity becomes living stone. The Pope recalled that Leo XIII founded Sant’Anselmo and the Benedictine College to strengthen the presence of the Order in the Church and promote communion among monasteries, instituting the Office of the Abbot Primate as the visible sign of this unity. Then as now, Leo XIV noted, monasticism is a “frontier reality”, capable of planting “centers of prayer, work, and charity” even in desolate places, turning both material and spiritual deserts into fertile ground.
“The monastery has increasingly been characterized as a place of growth, peace, hospitality, and unity, even in the darkest periods of history.”
This sentence—spoken with firmness and gratitude—is the key to the homily: for the Pope, the monastic vocation is not a relic of the past but a prophetic form of presence in the contemporary Church, all the more necessary in times of confusion and fragmentation. Leo XIV does not hide the challenges of the present: he speaks of “sudden changes”, of new trials that test faith and question ecclesial institutions. Yet precisely here, he explains, the monastic way appears as a sapiential and necessary response: to root life in Christ, to place Him at the center, to translate faith into prayer, study, and holiness of life.
“Like Peter, Benedict, and so many others, we too can respond to the vocation we have received only by placing Christ at the center of our existence and mission.”
The homily opens to a wider ecclesial perspective: the Pope describes Sant’Anselmo as a beating heart of the Benedictine world, a place where liturgy, lectio divina, theological research, and community life converge in a living synergy, in continuity with the teaching of Saint Benedict, who in the Prologue to the Rule defines the monastery as a “school of the Lord’s service.”
The metaphor of the heart pumping life into the body—drawn from the First Letter to the Corinthians—intertwines with that of the river flowing from the Temple in Ezekiel: images of communion and mutual nourishment, of a Church as a living organism. “In this busy hive of Sant’Anselmo,” the Pope said, “everything must begin from God and return to God, to be tested and confirmed.”
The Wisdom of Faith and the Gift of Humility
Another key passage concerns the knowledge of divine mysteries: Leo XIV quotes Saint John Paul II, who in 1986, visiting the Atheneum, reminded that theology is not the achievement of human genius but God’s gift to the humble. The Pope takes up this intuition, framing it within a vision in which the intelligence of faith arises from listening and adoration, not from erudition for its own sake. It is a message that subtly yet clearly responds to an ecclesial culture that risks losing the contemplative dimension of theology. The dedication of a church, the Pope added, is a “door open to the eternal,” a place where space and time, the finite and the infinite, man and God meet. Here Leo XIV cites Evangelii gaudium, but in an original way: not to repeat a vocabulary, but to highlight the tension between limitation and fullness that shapes monastic life. It is in this tension, he says, that the human being finds himself again.
Drawing on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Pope rereads the Church in its dual dimension—“human and divine, visible and invisible, active and contemplative”—stressing that what is human must be “ordered and subordinated to the divine.” Here lies one of the highest points of Leo XIV’s thought: a theology of harmony, not of opposition.
A Message for the Church and the World
In closing, the Pope recalled the famous passage of Saint Peter: “We are a people God has made his own to proclaim His wonderful works.” The monastery, he affirmed, must be a sign of this light crossing the darkness, a place where the beauty of sharing what one has freely received is experienced. It is both a warning and a hope: that monasticism today may remain light, peace, culture, discernment, and freedom for the world. In the austere penumbra of the Basilica, while the Gregorian chant rose like an ancient breath, one sensed a Church rediscovering its source—not in numbers, not in strategies, not in the rhetoric of openness, but in that “act of faith that recognizes in Christ the Son of the living God.”
Leo XIV, who has made sobriety his style and discernment his hallmark, does not need to proclaim revolutions: it is enough for him to celebrate with monks, to listen to silence, to recognize the power of the liturgy. In this, more than in a thousand documents, the sign of a pontificate emerges—one that seeks to restore to the Church her praying soul.
Perhaps for this reason, at the end of the visit, the Pope smiled once more as he greeted the Abbot Primate. A simple yet eloquent smile, saying more than many speeches: the smile of a man who—while others try to politically instrumentalize him or reduce him to an aesthetic symbol—keeps his gaze fixed on Christ crucified. And with the silent strength of signs, he invites the whole Church to do the same—without many words.
f.G.A.
Silere non possum