By Robert Royal
Pope Leo has convened the world’s cardinals this week to a consistory, a return to normal practice that over the past dozen years was largely relegated in favor of «synodal» encounters. Thus, now that the Jubilee Year has concluded, the current Pope is doing something new—and ancient—in any case, a break with his predecessor’s way of proceeding, in the very first days of 2026. What might this mean?
A consistory is an opportunity for the cardinals to be authentic collaborators of the Holy Father, to speak with him—and among themselves—about a divine mission of worldwide scope. What is discussed there and how it influences Leo’s pontificate may set the course of the Church for the next decade or more. And there is much that must be said—and let us pray that it is said—beyond the tiresome journalistic obsessions with immigration, the climate, LGBT, women. Because a disturbing question looms before us, posed directly long ago by a Certain Person: «But when the Son of Man [comes again], will he find faith on earth?»
Christianity, in various forms, is not going to disappear from the world anytime soon. But the full truth of the faith, that for which saints and doctors, missionaries, martyrs, and confessors have worked, suffered, and died, is faltering. And this, of course, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is attacked, both from within and from without, by people who wish it ill.
We should not avert our gaze from this fact. It was unfortunate (from the perspective of today’s Christian) that the Holy Father said in the final days of the Jubilee Year: «Christians have no enemies, only brothers and sisters.» We understand what he meant, of course, and we can even second it in a certain sense. But that is only true at a very high level of abstraction, and it does not express the full truth, that is, the Catholic truth. Not following the whole truth leads, as we have seen since the virtual abandonment after Vatican II of the notion of the Church Militant, to a misreading of the world in which we live, with disastrous effects.
When Voltaire famously said Écrasez l’infâme, that was far from the beginning—or the end—of hatred toward the Catholic faith. The French Revolution and its totalitarian offspring demonstrated that. In the same Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught: «love your enemies [ἐχθροὺς]» (Matthew 5:44-45). Even before Christ’s birth, Zechariah, invoking a much older Hebrew wisdom, proclaimed:
Through his holy prophets he promised from of old
to save us from our enemies [ἐχθρῶν],
from the hands of all who hate us.
The spiritual father of Pope Leo, St. Augustine, wrote wisely: «That your enemies have been created is God’s work; that they hate you and want to ruin you is their work. What must you say about them in your heart? ‘Lord, have mercy on them, forgive their sins, put the fear of God in them, change them.'»
And, of course, as every true Christian must believe, there exists THE Enemy, who hates God and tempted Eve to bring ruin upon the entire human race.
Thus, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition—no less than ordinary human experience—tells us that we have and will have enemies, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not. And we must not only pray for them, but take firm steps—in the line of what St. Augustine was crucial in helping the Church and all the West to think through by means of the theory of the just war.
We have a duty, for example, to prevent harm to individual Christians and others (thousands have died recently in Nigeria, in addition to several other nations); or to churches (France is currently losing two religious buildings per month to arson); or even to the very presence of Christians in the world, especially in places like China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Muslim-majority nations, about which the Vatican largely remains silent.
Here, then, is a simple proposal that could stimulate cardinal thinking in this time of consistory. Pope Francis stated bluntly that we should build bridges and not walls. A bridge is a good thing—in its proper place. But so are walls, because we may wish to «live in peace with all.» However, there are enemies to whom only a fool would open the gates. The whole Christian life revolves around what we once did not hesitate to call spiritual combat. In fact, often the correct separation of one thing from another—whether the distinction between good and evil, or the physical protection of the faithful by frustrating evildoers—promotes order, peace, and charity according to God.
It is easy to see why, at Vatican II, some deplored the Church’s «fortress mentality.» But sixty years later, it is also easy to see the results of the open Church. What is clamorously lacking in the Church today is not less openness to the «Other,» but the failure to defend—and define—itself.
As Benedict XVI observed, it was right that the Council recognized the partial good that exists in other religious traditions. But if one insists too much on that—to get along with others—it is unavoidable to lose missionary zeal, the conviction that it is through the full truth about Jesus, the only Savior, that we can be redeemed from our partially true and disastrously false ways. No one sacrifices his life to spread the Gospel if he thinks others are already fine where they are.
We do not expect—or desire—that a modern Pope call for crusades, as some of his predecessors did. But we do expect that a true leader recognize the threats and don the Pauline Armor of Light, especially when even secular observers have already begun to react against the militarization of sexual identity, the cancellation of voices deemed guilty of Islamophobia, homophobia, «hate,» patriarchy, «intolerance,» etc.
They are not easy problems to solve, but they are easy enough to see. Various approaches are possible—and even necessary. May the Pope and the cardinals be inspired to find them. But a crucial first step is to assume the whole truth: that bridges have their utility, but so do walls.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.