Monaco was not, for Leo XIV, a mere stop on a protocol itinerary, nor a pilgrimage through the immaculate shop window of affluent Europe. On this day, the Pope undertook something more demanding: he brought the Gospel into one of those places where contemporary man most readily cultivates the illusion of self-sufficiency. Monaco, with its prosperity, its institutional composure, its Catholic tradition and its international outlook, thus became not only a geographical place but a spiritual figure: that of a world that functions, and for that very reason risks no longer sensing its need to be saved.
Leo XIV did not go to the Principality simply to bless a well-appointed setting. He went there also to expose its blind spot. He addressed a prosperous, organised, respectable and socially recognised Catholicism: a Catholicism that can easily confuse stability with truth, efficiency with fruitfulness, order with conversion. That is why, as soon as he arrived at the Palace, the Pope spoke at once about the relationship between smallness, wealth and responsibility. He recalled that Monaco has a “vocation to promote encounter and to foster social friendship”, that “the little ones make history”, and that “what has been entrusted to us must not be buried in the ground, but put into circulation”. Even more striking was the passage in which he said: “Every talent, every opportunity and every good placed in our hands has a universal destination”, and therefore carries an intrinsic demand not to be “held back, but redistributed”.
The Pope’s words reach beyond the boundaries of the Principality and extend to the Church as well. For holding back is not only the temptation of economic elites; it is also one of our own temptations. Resources, roles, spaces, languages, forms, customs, even charisms are held on to as though they were possessions to be guarded rather than gifts to be placed back into circulation. The evangelical logic indicated by Leo XIV is the opposite: what is received must become responsibility, service and restitution. When the Church holds back, it grows rigid; when it grows rigid, it loses its fruitfulness; when it loses its fruitfulness, it ends by guarding itself more than the Kingdom.
In the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the Pope brought everything back to its centre, which is neither a programme of activity nor a cultural strategy, but Christ. “Before God and in God’s presence we have an advocate: Jesus Christ, the righteous one.” It is an exceptionally dense definition. Christ is called “advocate” because he places himself “in defence of the poor and sinners” and frees them from oppression, restoring them “in all their dignity” to the human and religious community. Leo then turns once more to us and reminds us that the Church herself is called to become an “advocate”, that is, “to defend man: the whole human person and every human being”. This is perhaps one of the strongest things said in the Principality of Monaco, because it frees the Church’s mission both from worldliness and from abstraction. To defend the human person does not mean draping the present in religious language, nor chasing after the world in the hope of appearing harmless to it. It means proclaiming “the Gospel of life, hope and love”, defending and promoting “the life of every man and every woman from conception until natural death”, and opposing those forms of secularism that reduce the person to individualism and ground social life solely on the production of wealth. In this perspective, the Church is not called to flatter the confusion of its age, but to illumine it. An ecclesial community that gives up defending man in truth will inevitably end up accompanying him in his disintegration.
The same rigour reappears in the meeting with young people and catechumens. The Holy Father showed that he understands with precision the spiritual pathology of the present: “a world that always seems to be in a hurry, eager for novelty, obsessed with a fluidity without bonds”, dominated by an “almost compulsive need for constant change”. Leo did not respond to that diagnosis with the tired moralism of those who do no more than lament the age in which they live. He responded by pointing to the source of human solidity: “it is love that gives stability to life”, first of all the love of God. Only from there does “restlessness find peace”, and the inner emptiness no longer seeks to fill itself with “the virtual approval of thousands of likes” or with artificial and violent forms of belonging. For years now, the illusion has been cultivated that the renewal of the Church consists in multiplying activities, instruments, presences, formulas, initiatives, linguistic adaptations and communications strategies. Leo XIV, instead, brings us back to the essential: “All of this requires prayer, moments of silence and reflection, to quiet the frenzy of doing and saying, of messages, reels and chats.” There is no contempt for modernity here, but rather a spiritual judgement upon it. Without interiority, nothing authentically Christian is born. What is born is movement, not life; agitation, not witness. And even when that agitation is dressed in ecclesiastical garments, carefully pressed and impeccably arranged, it remains agitation all the same.
During the Eucharistic Celebration at the Louis II Stadium, the Pope brought to light the deepest core of the message he delivered to Monaco in this brief visit: idolatry. Commenting on the Gospel of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, he said that their verdict “stemmed from a political calculation based on fear” and that they “want to kill the innocent, because behind their fear lies an attachment to power”. This is not merely an exegesis of the Johannine text. It is a key to understanding the present. Every time a system, civil or religious, deems what is essential to be expendable in order to save itself, the logic of Caiaphas appears again. Every time plausible reasons are advanced to expel, silence, marginalise or immolate the innocent, power reveals its idolatrous face. And indeed Leo XIV asks: “Even today, how many plots are devised in the world to kill the innocent; how many false reasons are put forward to get rid of them?”
Yet the most penetrating passage of the final homily is another: the moment in which the Pope defines the idol as a “small idea”. Idolatry is not, first of all, the crude worship of false divinities; it is the shrinking of one’s gaze. It is a diminished vision that “diminishes” both God and the human mind. That is why the Pope can say that liberation from idols means freedom “from power turned into domination, from wealth that degenerates into greed, from beauty dressed up as vanity”. In a formula of extraordinary density, he described not only the sickness of the world but also a possible sickness within the Church: the point at which great and good things can degenerate into idols, once they cease to be ordered to God and become instruments of self-preservation.
Within ecclesial life too there are reduced criteria which, little by little, come to impose themselves as the supreme measure. It happens when consensus is placed above truth, when numbers become a criterion of legitimacy, when image counts for more than substance, when institutional quiet takes precedence over evangelical courage, and when the efficiency of the apparatus is turned into a value to be defended at all costs. In such cases, even if one adopts pious formulas and an impeccably religious language, one is embracing the very logic of Caiaphas: letting what is essential fall away in order to preserve the existing order, softening the force of truth so as not to disturb the balance, and looking with greater fear at conversion than at the gradual emptying out of faith.
This is why Leo XIV’s visit to Monaco was much more than a successful event. It was a word addressed to the satisfied, the secure, the well-placed, to those who can still pronounce the name of God without any longer feeling its urgency. The Pope went where man seems to have everything, in order to remind him that he may still lack the one thing necessary. And he did so not with a rhetoric of poverty, but with the Gospel: smallness becoming vocation, good that must be placed back into circulation, Christ as the “advocate” of man, faith that does not collapse into habit, silence that restores truth to the heart, the idol that diminishes God and man, and mercy alone as that which saves the world. In this sense Monaco ceased to be only Monaco. For one day, it became the mirror of an elegant and weary Europe, and at the same time the place where the Successor of Peter reminded us that without God even order can become sterile, even wealth can become a burden, and even religion can be reduced to an empty form. With God, by contrast, even the little ones make history.
fr.B.M.
Silere non possum