Pope Leo Shrugs Off Schism, Goes for God and Glamor as Matthew McConaughey and Patti Smith Pay Homage

Pope Leo XIV’s audiences in recent days with the singer Patti Smith and the actor Matthew McConaughey suggest that the Supreme Pontiff grasps the potency of celebrity to amplify the message of the Vicar of Christ and leader of 1.4 billion Catholics. On Wednesday Mr. McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, met the pope at St. Peter’s Basilica. Mr. McConaughey, who won the Oscar in 2014 for his role as Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club”— a movie about the AIDS crisis — is not Catholic, but his wife is a member of Pope Leo’s flock. Last year Mr. McConaughey published a book, “Poems & Prayers.” In 2020 Mr. McConaughey explained that “I go to church once a week,” he said. “I go, I pray, and I do inventory. I take a deep breath, understand myself as me being number two in God’s house, and go back through my week.” The meeting with Ms. Smith occurred last Friday at the Apostolic Palace, and lasted for about 40 minutes. Images show her wearing a Tau cross, a symbol closely associated with the Franciscan order, during the audience. The founder of that order, St. Francis of Assisi, used it as his signature and personal seal. Pope Leo is a member of the Augustinian order, while Pope Francis took his papal name in homage to the Franciscans.Ms. Smith is, like Pope Leo, from Chicago. In May, Ms. Smith, who is not herself a Catholic, created what the Vatican called a “sound prayer” for the Holy See’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Last month, Pope Leo, in a preface to a collection of writings, cited another singer-songwriter, — Bob Dylan. The pope quoted the bard’s unpublished “Go Away You Bomb” from 1963.Ms. Smith and Mr. Dylan have long been friends, and Ms. Smith has said that the older singer “just had everything that I was looking for in my own personal evolution.” The two met at the Bitter End at New York, where Ms. Smith told him that she “hated poetry.” She recalls loitering outside of a record store at Philadelphia, waiting for it to open so she could purchase a copy of “Blonde on Blonde.” The two meetings came in quick succession after the Bishop of Rome returned to the Vatican from his summer vacation at Castel Gandolfo, a papal pile a 45 minute drive from the Eternal City. Just before the pontiff took off for Gandolfo, the Church was riven by a schism between the Holy See and a splinter conservative group that defied Pope Leo and was punished with excommunication.That group, the Society of St. Pius X, is unrepentant and insists on its adherence to the Latin Mass and its prerogative to consecrate bishops. The SSPX, which rejects the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, counts some 25,000 adherents in America. The excommunication, which adheres to any “formal” follower of the group and includes a ban on sacraments, amounts to the most significant schism since the doctrine of papal infallibility split the Church in 1870. The SSPX proceeded to consecrate four new bishops despite the pope’s warning that doing so would amount to a “schismatic act” of “extreme gravity” that would “tear the seamless garment of Christ.”The SSPX responded by declaring “Far be it from us to separate ourselves from the Roman Church. We desire, on the contrary, to serve her by means that are extraordinary, as one would assist a mother in distress who requires particular help, even if such help is not understood by everyone.”Pope Leo could also be facing an emerging rebellion over the role of the Latin Mass in the contemporary Church. That ancient version of the liturgy was formulated at the Council of Trent in 1570 under Pope Pius St. V. The Tridentine Mass reigned supreme until 1969, when the Second Vatican Council under Pope John Paul XXIII promulgated the vernacular “Novus Ordo” or “Ordinary Form.” In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI handed down a decree, Summorum Pontificum, that allowed the faithful to attend Latin Mass without the prior approval of their bishop. In 2021, though, Pope Francis, in a pivot widely seen as a crackdown on conservatives, restored Vatican control over where and when the ancient rite could be celebrated. Pope Leo has held that line rather than revert to the more permissive stance taken by the German pope. Last week one of those conservatives, Archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Cordileone, declared that the Latin Mass is “unstoppable” and warned that if Pope Leo does not accommodate the growing enthusiasm for the Old Rite its adherents “will then go to these other groups that are not in full communion with the See of Rome.” Among those groups is the SSPX.

Pope Leo Shrugs Off Schism, Goes for God and Glamor as Matthew McConaughey and Patti Smith Pay Homage

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