“In Illo Uno Unum,” meaning “In the One, we are one,” is Pope Leo XIV’s motto on his papal coat of arms.
Saint Augustine first uttered the phrase in a sermon on Psalm 127 where he explained that “although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one.”
In retaining his episcopal motto as a cardinal, the new Pope took his cue from the late Francis, who unusually retained his old episcopal motto “Miserando atque eligendo (by having mercy, by choosing him)” on his papal coat of arms.
If it seems as if the new Pope — who was elected after the cardinal-electors made it known they were “looking for someone following the pathway of Francis but not a ‘photocopy’ of him” — is continuing Francis’ legacy and he does have his own reasons for doing so.
Pope Leo XIV, for one, is retaining his old motto since it perfectly illuminates his plans to unify a fractured Church rent by dwindling numbers of churchgoers and by damaging factional warfare between progressives and conservatives.
Current Church politics, as writer Colm Toibin neatly sums it up, revolves around the doctrinal dispute: “The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change.”
In his baby steps towards unity in his infant papacy, Pope Leo XIV vows to build bridges. During his first public appearance at St. Peter’s Basilica, he declared: “We must be a Church that builds bridges.”
The bridge theme, says a Vatican watcher, is surprisingly also in step with the wishes of the cardinal-electors that the new pope should epitomize a pontifex, the old title for the pope meaning bridge builder.
As it is, unifying a fractious Church is an enormous challenge.
But missionary Pope Leo XIV may be up to the task. A news report says his colleagues recall a calm and grounded Church leader capable of moderating between factions.
Toibin also observes that “Pope Leo, thus far in his life, has been skilled at placing himself in the middle whenever there are warring factions. He can’t be called conservative and he can’t be called too liberal.”
But while the new Pope subscribes to “the idea that being neither one thing or another” is key to addressing the crises in the Church, he nonetheless sent an unmistakable signal about his pastoral commitment to social justice with his choice of name.
He chose Leo XIV to pay homage to Leo XIII, known as “the Pope of the Workers” for his defense of workers’ rights during the first industrial revolution in his historic 1891 “Rerum Novarum (Of Revolutionary Change)” encyclical.
“Rerum Novarum,” the new Pope believes, offers a treasury of social teaching responses to current social challenges unleashed by “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
In signaling that he’s perhaps a “social justice warrior,” the new Pope is clearly displaying his progressive credentials, despite him being an American-born leader of the Church.
Until 69-year-old Chicago-born Robert Prevost slipped on the fisherman’s ring, the idea of a North American pontiff was taboo. A pontiff from a superpower with hegemonic cultural and secular global influence was plainly too hard to swallow.
But, dual American and Peruvian citizen Pope Leo XIV is known as the “least American” of the US prelates, having spent much of his adult life outside the US, most of it as bishop in the small Peruvian city of Chiclayo.
As it also happens, “more Latin American than American” Pope Leo XIV has a Twitter feed history full of definitive anti-far right feeds which not only sent Trump-loving Catholics ballistic but it triggered a deranged white nationalist to derisively dismiss him as a “WOKE MARXIST POPE.”