Pope at Mass: Consistory a time for Cardinals to reflect on Church’s path

By Devin Watkins

At the start of the second day of the Extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV presided at Mass with the Cardinals who have come from across the globe to consult with him.

They began their discussion on Wednesday, January 7, taking up the themes of “Synod and synodality” and “Evangelization and mission in the Church in the light of Evangelii gaudium.”

In his homily, the Pope began with the theme of fraternal love, saying the Consistory represents a moment of grace that expresses their unity in service to the Church.

He noted that the word Consistory comes from the Latin root word meaning “to stop,” saying the Cardinals have stopped their usual work to be with him in Rome.

“We have set aside our activities for a time and renounced even important commitments, so as to come together to discern what the Lord asks of us for the good of His people,” he said.

Calling it a “prophetic gesture” for our frenetic world, Pope Leo said the act of pausing to pray and listen together helps bring us into focus on our goal, so that we never flail in blind action.

Rather than promoting any personal or collective agendas, the Cardinals are invited to discern in light of the Eucharist, so that Christ may return their plans purified, enlightened, and transformed.

“Our College, though rich in many skills and notable gifts,” he said, “is not called, first of all, to be a team of experts, but a community of faith, in which the gifts that each one brings—offered to the Lord and returned by Him—produce, according to His Providence, the greatest fruit.”

The Pope invited the Cardinals to embrace the Trinitarian Love of God and to turn their moment of “stopping” into a “great act of love—toward God, the Church, and all men and women of the world.”

In prayer and silence, they are called to look each other in the face, listen to one another, and become a voice for all those whom the Lord has entrusted to their pastoral concern.

The Consistory, he said, is thus “an act to be lived with a humble and generous heart, in the awareness that it is by grace that we are here, and that there is nothing of what we carry that we have not received, as a gift and a talent not to be wasted, but to be invested with prudence and courage.”

The Pope recalled Pope St. Leo the Great’s exhortation for Christians to cooperate in the same Spirit so that the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, and no one seeks their own interests over those of others.

Pope Leo XIV went on to recall the “multifaceted beauty” of the Church, to which the Consistory bears witness in its “unity of grace and faith.”

He urged the Cardinals to heed Jesus’ call for them to respond to the desire for peace of the “great crowd” of humanity which struggles for survival amid misery and “desperate existential emptiness.”

The Cardinals’ purpose for meeting together, said Pope Leo, is to help each other and the Pope receive and distribute the “five loaves and two fishes that Providence never fails to provide where His children ask for help.”

“What you offer to the Church in your service, at every level, is something great and extremely personal and profound, unique to each and precious to all,” he said. “And the responsibility you share with the Successor of Peter is grave and burdensome.”

In conclusion, the Pope thanked the Cardinals for their service, and entrusted their work together to the Lord.