The Stewardship of the Faith: Saint Leo II and the Crisis of Tradition
MASS Sacerdotes tui
LESSON Sir 44:16-27 45:3-20
GOSPEL St Matthew 25:14-23
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
“Behold a great priest, who in his days pleased God, and was found just.”
The Church applies these words today to Saint Leo II because he understood that authority in the Church is not ownership but stewardship. The priesthood, the episcopacy, and above all the Chair of Peter are not possessions granted for the exaltation of those who hold them. They are sacred trusts, given for the defence of the Faith, the sanctification of souls, and the honour of Almighty God.
Our Lord teaches this in the Gospel. A master going into a far country calls his servants and delivers his goods into their hands. To one he gives five talents, to another two, and to another one. The servants receive the talents, but they do not become their proprietors. They must employ them faithfully and return them with increase. The master will come again, and each servant must render an account.
This parable contains the mystery of every office in the Church. Christ has entrusted to His servants His doctrine, His Sacrifice, His priesthood, His sacraments, His moral law, and the government of souls. To Peter He entrusted the keys and the duty of confirming his brethren. Yet all these goods remain Christ’s. No Pope, Council, bishop, priest, theologian, or generation may treat them as raw material for reconstruction. Authority exists to guard what has been received.
Saint Leo II was elected to the Apostolic See in the year 681, consecrated in 682 after a delay caused by imperial interference, and died on 28 June 683. His pontificate lasted scarcely ten months. Yet into those few months he compressed a remarkable labour. He defended the liberty of the Church, resisted the pretensions of Ravenna, confirmed the decrees of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, translated its acts for the West, adorned the sacred liturgy, and cared for widows, orphans, and the poor.
His brief reign is itself a sermon. God will not ask how long we possessed the talent, but what we did with it. Leo held the Chair of Peter for less than a year, yet he did not bury its authority beneath timidity or fear. He laboured until the Master called him and merited the praise of today’s Gospel: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
The Collect identifies his governing virtue. God strengthened blessed Leo “with the virtue of firmness to protect the freedom of the Church.” Christian firmness is not obstinacy, anger, or pride. It is the strength to remain faithful to truth when compromise is easier; to resist pressure when silence would become betrayal; and to prefer the judgement of God to the favour of men.
Leo lived when the emperors of Constantinople interfered habitually in ecclesiastical affairs. Ravenna, supported by imperial power, sought autonomy from Rome. Saint Leo resisted, not because he desired personal domination, but because the visible constitution of the Church is not a human arrangement to be altered according to political convenience. The liberty of the Church means that she must remain free from Caesar in order to obey Christ.
Yet Saint Leo’s defence of Roman primacy cannot be separated from his defence of the Apostolic Faith. He confirmed the condemnation of Monothelitism, the heresy which denied that Christ possesses a true human will as well as the divine will. This was not an argument over obscure terminology. If Christ did not assume a complete human nature, then He did not heal the whole of human nature. The precision of doctrine guarded the reality of Redemption.
Saint Leo also confirmed the Council’s condemnation of Pope Honorius I. Honorius was condemned not for solemnly defining heresy for the universal Church, but for negligence: for failing to extinguish error and allowing the purity of the Apostolic Faith to be endangered.
There is a terrible lesson here. A shepherd may betray his office not only by teaching falsehood, but by failing to defend truth. The watchman who sees the enemy approaching and refuses to sound the trumpet has betrayed the city, even if he did not himself open its gates.
Saint Leo therefore teaches two truths which no Catholic may separate. The authority of Peter is divinely instituted and necessary for the visible unity of the Church. Yet Peter’s authority exists to preserve Peter’s confession: “Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Authority does not create the Faith. Authority receives it, guards it, defines it against error, and transmits it intact. The Pope is not master of Apostolic Tradition. He is its supreme custodian.
This brings us inevitably to the grave wound now opened between Rome and the Society of Saint Pius X.
The consecrations at Écône were not undertaken merely to preserve a preferred form of worship. The Society believes that the present necessity concerns the perennial Catholic Faith itself: doctrine, worship, moral teaching, priestly formation, ecclesiology, and the government of souls.
For the Society, the ancient Roman Mass is not an archaeological treasure or an aesthetic refuge. It is the doctrinal embodiment of the Catholic religion. Its prayers confess without ambiguity the propitiatory Sacrifice of Calvary, the sacrificial priesthood, the Real Presence, the gravity of sin, the necessity of grace, the intercession of the saints, the reality of judgement, and the sovereign majesty of God.
To preserve this Mass is therefore not merely to preserve ceremonies. It is to preserve the Faith which those ceremonies express, protect, and transmit.
There is no Catholic Faith without Apostolic Tradition, and there can be no Catholic Church without the Catholic Faith.
Tradition is not an optional inheritance added to the Church. It is the Church’s living reception and transmission of what Christ delivered to the Apostles. The Church does not invent herself anew in every generation. She receives, guards, and hands on. She may deepen her understanding of the deposit; she may never contradict, reverse, or replace it.
The crisis cannot therefore be reduced to a struggle between “Tradition” and “the Church.” Such an opposition is impossible. Tradition is the Faith of the Church transmitted through time; the Church is the divinely constituted guardian of that Faith. The Church cannot defect from the Faith, but those exercising authority within her may fail gravely in their duty to protect and transmit it.
The real question is whether the goods entrusted by Christ have been guarded faithfully in practice.
The Society judges that an extraordinary necessity exists because the normal exercise of authority has not adequately protected those goods. It maintains that bishops are required not merely to perform ordinations and confirmations, but to ensure the continuation of priests formed to preach the perennial Faith without compromise and to offer the traditional Sacrifice without ambiguity.
One may dispute that judgement. One may question whether the remedy adopted was proportionate or whether an exceptional act risks becoming a permanent mode of ecclesiastical existence. But one may not honestly reduce the Society’s motive to nostalgia, institutional ambition, or attachment to elaborate ceremonies. It believes that the transmission of the Faith, and the priesthood necessary for that transmission, are in danger.
It would not have taken so fearful a step otherwise.
Saint Leo II therefore addresses Rome and Écône alike, though their offices and responsibilities are not equal.
To Écône he says that the episcopacy is not a private possession. Bishops belong to the visible and hierarchical constitution of the Church. Any extraordinary action must remain ordered towards the restoration of normal ecclesiastical unity. The new bishops must be what the Society says they are: auxiliaries for priesthood, sacraments, doctrine, and souls, without pretended territorial jurisdiction and without the construction of a parallel Church.
But to Rome Saint Leo speaks with terrible force. It is not sufficient merely to possess authority. Authority must fulfil the purpose for which Christ established it. Honorius possessed the papal office, yet Leo condemned his negligence because he had failed to guard the purity of the Faith. The keys were given to defend the household, not merely to demonstrate who controls its doors.
Rome cannot resolve the crisis simply by repeating that the Pope possesses supreme jurisdiction. The Society does not deny that doctrine. The disputed question is whether obedience to a particular command may be withheld when that command is judged, with moral certainty, to be gravely prejudicial to the Faith and contrary to a higher obligation owed to God.
Such a judgement is fearful. It cannot rest upon preference, resentment, or private convenience. It must be grounded in objective danger to the Faith, made with reverence for legitimate authority, and limited by the necessity which occasions it. Resistance can never become a general principle of autonomy.
Yet neither can administrative unity substitute for unity in the Faith. Catholic unity is unity in doctrine, sacraments, worship, and legitimate government. The Faith is not one element among several. It gives supernatural meaning to all the others.
If Rome wishes to disprove the Society’s claim of necessity, it must do more than condemn the consequences. It must remedy the causes. It must demonstrate in deed that the perennial Faith will be taught without equivocation; that traditional priests may be formed without surrendering the principles for which they exist; that the ancient Roman liturgy will be protected rather than merely tolerated; and that bishops wholly committed to Tradition will be given a secure canonical mission.
Authority cannot demand trust while leaving unresolved the conditions which destroyed trust. It cannot denounce extraordinary remedies indefinitely while refusing to provide an ordinary one.
At the same time, the Society must remember that it does not own Tradition. Tradition belongs to the whole Church. The Society is a servant of the inheritance, not its proprietor. Every extraordinary measure must remain directed towards the day when authority and Tradition will again be seen in their proper harmony: Peter confirming his brethren in the Faith, and those brethren rendering obedience without fear that obedience will require the surrender of what they received from their fathers.
The tragedy before us is not that one side cares for faith and the other for unity. Faith and unity are not rivals in the mind of Christ. The tragedy is that decades of crisis have allowed them to appear as competing obligations.
Saint Leo II shows us the true order. He defended Roman primacy because he loved the Church. He condemned negligence in the Roman See because he loved the Faith. He adorned the liturgy because worship is the voice of faith. He served the poor because the truth he defended was the truth of divine charity.
His firmness was neither servility nor rebellion. It was fidelity.
The Postcommunion asks that the Church, nourished by sacred food, may “enjoy ever greater freedom and remain steadfast in purity of faith.” There is the whole prayer for this hour: freedom and purity of faith; authority and Tradition; unity and truth—not torn apart, but reunited beneath the Kingship of Christ.
May Saint Leo II obtain for Pope Leo XIV the firmness to make obedience safe for Tradition; for the bishops of the Society, the humility to use their powers solely for the defence of the Faith and the salvation of souls; and for all Catholics the grace to reject both blind servility and embittered faction.
For there is no Faith without Tradition. There is no Church without the Faith. And there is no faithful stewardship of Christ’s Church unless the talents entrusted by the Master are guarded whole, employed courageously, and returned to Him without loss when He comes to demand His account.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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