“Popes pass, but the Curia remains.” Leone XIV said it with the disarming calm of one who knows history and has no need to display it. Those words, spoken during his first meeting with the Officials of the Roman Curia, are now the key to understanding his first Motu Proprio, Coniuncta cura, published today, 6 October 2025, and signed on the Feast of the Holy Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. A brief but powerful and programmatic text. With it, the Pope abrogates the 2022 Rescriptum and performs an act that is both juridical and symbolic: he restores trust in the Curia, in the economic bodies, in a system that had long operated under the weight of suspicion. After years of forced centralization, Leone XIV chooses the path of co-responsibility, mutual trust, and real communion. A kind of challenge: “Have we spoken so much about synodality? Now let’s apply it.”
Trust as an Act of Governance
In his address last May to the Officials of the Roman Curia, and to the employees of the Holy See, the Governorate, and the Vicariate of Rome, Leone XIV emphasized that “memory is an essential element in a living organism: it is not only oriented toward the past, but nourishes the present and guides the future.” With Coniuncta cura, the Pope shows that memory, for him, is not an abstract concept but a form of evangelical governance. One does not govern by concentrating power, but by trusting. One does not reform by imposing, but by fostering dialogue. For this reason, the new Motu Proprio abandons the logic of absolute control and introduces a new balance: the APSA regains a leading role, the IOR retains an important but not exclusive function, and the Investment Committee becomes the natural place of cooperation and transparency. It is a synodal vision of Vatican economics, where authority does not crush but coordinates, and where the management of resources once again becomes an instrument of communion, not of power.
The End of the Age of Suspicion
Past reforms sought to respond to financial scandals with an emergency mindset: merge, centralize, control. Yet recent history teaches that centralization does not eliminate errors — it concentrates them. Leone XIV has understood this over time, through years of mission and his experience of governance within the Order of Saint Augustine, where he is remembered as a man firm in decisions but open to dialogue. The Pope knows well that a system based on multiple centers of oversight, capable of mutual correction and vigilance, is the one that best prevents corruption and manipulation. It is the concrete translation of that “unity in diversity”he has spoken of since his first day. In this sense, Coniuncta cura is not only an economic norm — it is an ecclesiological choice. It means trusting the institutions, restoring their autonomy, and believing that the unity of the Church is born not from uniformity, but from collaboration.
From Power to Communion
Leone XIV is not a centralizing Pope; he is a promoter of unity. His style — sober, measured, yet determined —restores to Church governance the character of shared service. And he does so not with proclamations, but through concrete gestures. At a time when the Roman Curia was seen as an apparatus in need of reform, Leone XIV returns it to itself: he considers it an “institution that preserves and transmits the historical memory of the Church and the ministry of her Bishops,” as he said in the Paul VI Hall. He does not fear it, does not place it under receivership, but values it. It is an act of trust that, in ecclesial language, weighs more than a hundred decrees.
A New Beginning
Coniuncta cura marks the beginning of a new season of governance. Trust, memory, and co-responsibility become the coordinates of a new way of being “Bishop of Rome” — not an administrative monarch, but a guardian of unity. Leone XIV shows that the peace he preaches is not rhetoric, but a method of governance. And so, while his words continue to echo — sometimes distorted in television sketches, reinterpreted in editorials by those who wish to make him an ideological banner, or twisted in blogs by those who attack him simply because he refuses to confirm their obsessions disguised as certainties — the Curia rediscovers an ancient and ever-new mission: to serve in communion, remembering that unity is not imposed, but built.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
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