Vatican City – Whenever one speaks of a Pope, inevitably psychological and spiritual categories are projected onto him, categories that risk distorting reality. It is not uncommon that, faced with the first hundred days of Leo XIV, some have compared him to Francis. There are those, like Antonio Spadaro, who did not hesitate to set up a shameful marketing operation, exploiting the face and name of Leo XIV for profit, together with Alberto Melloni, who is certainly no stranger to such practices. Meanwhile, the Dicastery that should protect the image of the Pope is too busy publishing error-filled posts on social media to call these figures to order. After all, it is well known: in the Vatican, if you are an “insider,” you can do whatever you want.
Spadaro indulged in a superficial and baseless observation, claiming that the same restlessness (inquietudine) that supposedly guided Francis now animates Leo XIV. But is that really the case?
The word “inquietudine” carries a precise theological and spiritual weight. St. Augustine, in the Confessions, writes: “Inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te.” Restlessness, then, is that inner movement born of the awareness of human limitation and of the insatiable desire for God. It is a wound that burns, but does not destroy: a longing for the Other, a nostalgia for a rest that cannot be found in earthly things.
Those who observe Leo XIV, in his sober gestures and his unshouted words, perceive precisely this kind of inquietudine. He is a man who does not settle, who constantly seeks to bring the Church back to the heart of the Gospel, with the awareness of never fully possessing the answer. His is not agitation, but thirst. It is a restlessness that generates silence, listening, searching, vigilance.
Different, however, is what Francis demonstrated in twelve years of pontificate. What animated him was not the same Augustinian inquietudine, but rather a form of irrequietezza (unquietness). The difference is substantial. Irrequietezzais the constant movement that prevents one from stopping, the difficulty of finding stability, the need to constantly produce novelties so as not to fall into immobility. It is a nervous rather than spiritual motion: an activity that risks confusing evangelical dynamism with mere human activism.
If inquietudine is rooted in the depth of the soul, irrequietezza often remains on the surface. The first leads to prayer, contemplation, trusting expectation; the second rather to agitation, the search for approval, and a continuous acceleration that leaves no room for silence.
This is why the comparison between Leo XIV and Francis, from this perspective, does not hold. The former lives that healthy inquietudine which springs from the awareness of one’s own smallness before God, and which paradoxically becomes spiritual strength. The latter, instead, often showed an irrequietezza which, though pastorally motivated, turned into a constant frenzy of gestures and words.
Perhaps it is precisely in this difference that the current perception of the two pontificates is at stake: Leo XIV appears as a man who, even in turmoil, knows how to remain silent before the Mystery; Francis, as a man who, though eager for closeness, could not resist the need to appear, to make himself talked about, and to speak incessantly.
True inquietudine, Augustine reminds us, is a gift: it does not leave us at peace, but leads us to God. Irrequietezza, on the other hand, often scatters us.
d.T.A.
Silere non possum