Our Holy Mother the Church has once again proven, as if proof were needed, that the “rates of yell” will not prevail against her.

Much of the latter portion of Pope Francis’ pontificate was beset by loud-mouthed critics, garment-tearing Cassandras, non-stop crybabies, perpetual kvetchers, and schadenfreude doomsayers yelling from rooftops about the imminent fracturing of a Church irreparably rent between so-called liberal and conservative, progressive and traditionalist, factions.

Some of it was a function of misapprehending Francis’ Jesuitical style of provocation to promote passage to deeper understanding. Some of it was the tiresome cacophony of media squeaky-wheelism fed by the falsehood that the only things of interest in the world are complaints and disasters, real or imagined.

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Yet the elevation of Leo XIV has put a pause, if not finally put paid, to even that harangue. At a foundational level, the speed of consensus around him by the Conclave of Cardinals refuted it conclusively. It reminded the secular world that there is infinitely more to the Church than can be identified and expressed by exhausted political category clichés whose origins were the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly after the 1789 Revolution.

Yes, there needs to be cautionary awareness among Catholics about the media habit of honeymoon hypocrisy whereby everything is wonderful about the latest bright shiny thing – until it isn’t. Sooner rather than later, some headline hunter on a frantic deadline will need to invent a scandal or a manufacture some portent of crisis, and the Church will be deemed tarnished and terrible once more. It’s what they do.

What matters most is that it ultimately won’t matter. We know, as we have always known but need constant reminding, that Holy Mother Church will prevail regardless of all that. We have our own immediate witness of the Holy Spirit placing Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost in exactly the right places at exactly the right times to be chosen as Pope Leo XIV.

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Rightly, much has been made of Leo XIV’s American birth and citizenship. Its importance has been emphasized for a variety of reasons, not least the counterpoint he provides to the contorted confrontationality of Donald Trump. There has also been a due notice taken of his pledged continuity with the Francis pontificate in terms of the emphasis on synodality, ecology, and the Church as a “field hospital” to the impoverished, suffering and broken.

What’s less often remarked is the new pope’s native contrast with Francis as a natural positive for what the Church needs at this exact moment. It’s not a matter of mollifying rifts but of stretching to the next necessity the way the “antagonistic” muscles of the body work together by contraction and extension to produce greater strength.

Francis, by origin, temperament, formation and experience, was a cleric on a mission, namely to move the Church back into the world from the doctrinal reflections of his predecessor. Leo, by biography, is a priestly missionary, one who has not only been in the world but is intensely familiar with it. A native English-speaker fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin, he meets the task of speaking the languages of men to bring all souls to Christ. 

A coincidence with the precise needs of the Church today? Only to those blind to the movement of the Spirit through Her. We in the Canadian Church are especially well positioned to see the spirit of that movement.

Four years ago this week, Canada, and Canadian Catholics even more than their fellow citizens, were thrown into tumult by alleged revelations of unmarked graves detected at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. In perhaps one of the most disgraceful displays of political perfidy in our history, the former prime minister exploited the allegations with a mawkish sentimentality that desecrated Indigenous people and the cause of reconciliation. 

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Yet despite bearing the blowback in the form of burnings of our churches, Canada’s Catholic leaders rose together and turned what could have been extended acrimony into an opening for penance and progress with our Indigenous brothers and sisters. Pope Francis brought his healing mission to the country with their full support.

Today, no compos mentis person in the land seriously believes the bodies of 215 children lie in the clay of the old apple orchard at the former Kamloops school.  But the Church’s Christian response continues to bear fruit. Indigenous voices  were heard. The “rates of yell” have subsided because Our Holy Mother Church’s spirit has prevailed.