Leo XIV: Across Borders and Generations

Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Metz on September 28 raises a question that reaches beyond the ceremony: what can Europe still hear when someone speaks of its roots, peace, and unity? His program includes an interreligious encounter and a meeting on Europe at the Robert Schuman Congress Center. The setting recalls reconciliation. The present makes that word difficult. In a continent divided by competing memories, fears, and expectations, belonging together can no longer be treated as an accomplished fact.

Leo brings a particular perspective. Born in the United States, formed through years of ministry in Peru and responsibilities in Rome, he approaches Europe through experiences extending beyond its own historical horizons. His biography invites a question: how does Europe appear when viewed from societies that received its missionaries, institutions, ambitions, and contradictions? What can it now offer without assuming that its experience remains the measure of the world?

War gives these questions urgency. Its consequences enter households through displacement, anxiety, economic insecurity, and antagonisms carried into public debate. Calls for peace encounter different understandings of what must be defended and what can be conceded. Europe’s institutions continue to function, but agreement about a shared future is harder to sustain. The language inherited from postwar reconstruction needs to recover its practical meaning.

Metz makes this uncertainty tangible. Families and institutions there have experienced what happens when a frontier moves across people who remain in place. The city also confronts France with an enduring paradox. In Alsace-Moselle, the Concordat of 1801, implemented in 1802, survived because these territories belonged to the German Empire when France adopted French law on the separation of the Churches and the State in 1905. Their return to France after 1918 preserved distinctive arrangements for Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Jewish institutions within a republic committed to laïcité.

The local health insurance regime carries another inheritance, rooted in German social legislation and subsequently adapted to supplement French social security. A French religious settlement preserved through German rule thus coexists with social protection descended from German legislation. National belonging has accommodated both. History survives here in arrangements that affect worship, illness, and ordinary security.

Such continuities complicate every simple account of Europe. They also distinguish a living inheritance from patrimoine understood chiefly as preservation. A cathedral can be restored while the faith that shaped it becomes difficult to understand. A synagogue can be commemorated while the belonging of living Jews remains contested. The preservation of buildings does not settle what responsibility their histories impose.

The Yiddish verb benken/בענקןען, to long for or miss, offers a vocabulary for attachment to voices, places, and relationships that cannot simply be recovered. Jewish attachment to Europe includes that longing, but also continuing creation and presence. Attachment to France carries its own promises and wounds. The renewed national commemoration of Alfred Dreyfus’s exoneration in July 2026 recalls how profoundly the Republic could betray a Jewish citizen – and how demanding the work of confronting that betrayal remains.

These inheritances belong within Europe’s account. Their presence makes any exclusively Christian genealogy inadequate, while leaving the Christian contribution indispensable to understanding the continent. The question is what these memories enable people to do together. Franz Stock, a German Catholic priest, gives that question an exacting human form.

Born in 1904 into a working-class family in Westphalia, Stock encountered the French peace movement as a young man. In 1926, he attended the international gathering at Bierville associated with Marc Sangnier. He subsequently studied in Paris, learned French thoroughly, and became rector of the German Catholic mission there in 1934. His attachment to France developed through language, friendship, and religious life before occupation placed those attachments under terrible strain.

Learning another language may disturb the apparent completeness of one’s own world. Other people acquire voices that resist the descriptions circulated about them. Stock’s preparation included this patient familiarity. France already contained people he knew and words he understood. War would make those relationships difficult to sustain without making them less real.

Under German occupation during World War II, Stock visited the prisons of Fresnes, La Santé, and the Cherche-Midi and accompanied condemned prisoners to execution. Among those he encountered were Christians, Jews, communists, resistance fighters, and hostages. His wartime journal records a ministry conducted where political categories had become sentences pronounced upon human lives.

Consider the difficulty of approaching those prisoners as a German priest. His language could recall an interrogator’s voice. His access depended upon authorities responsible for their captivity. His cassock might reassure, provoke suspicion, or mean nothing. Trust could never be demanded based on his vocation. It had to become possible through what he did.

Stock could not remove the circumstances that made him suspect. He could remain attentive within them, preserve confidences, and accompany people whose fate he often lacked the power to change. There are forms of service in which almost everything depends upon staying, even when staying brings neither success nor relief.

Looking backwards, it is tempting to make this a reassuring story about goodness surviving evil. Yet the prisoners died. Their families were bereaved. His presence did not redeem the system that killed them. Its significance lies partly in that limitation: a person continued to receive attention where the machinery of occupation had decided that his life was disposable.

This also raises the question of how holiness is recognized. In Christian faith, sanctity can take shape in the costly gift of oneself for another, even when that service cannot prevent death. Stock’s presence allows something of that vocation to become visible.

After liberation, Stock’s responsibility took another form. He directed the formation of German seminarians held as prisoners of war. The “Seminary Behind Barbed Wire” began at Orléans in 1945 and moved that August to Le Coudray, near Chartres, continuing until June 1947. Captivity became a place where a future clergy could resume its education and prepare for responsibilities in a devastated society.

The undertaking raised a question that survives political catastrophe: how can people formed within a damaged society become capable of serving differently? Defeat alone cannot accomplish this. Administrative change and replacement symbols cannot complete it. Intellectual work, truthful memory, and personal responsibility must enter the slow reconstruction of conscience.

Stock died in Paris on February 24, 1948, aged forty-three. Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, gave the absolution at his funeral. His judgment that Stock was “not merely a name, but a program” remains demanding when understood as an obligation rather than a commemorative tribute.

European construction would give reconciliation institutional form. Schuman, Adenauer, and De Gasperi brought Christian convictions into that undertaking alongside people shaped by other traditions. Pooling coal and steel addressed the material means through which France and Germany had waged war. Peace needed arrangements capable of surviving fluctuations in goodwill. Stock’s ministry illuminates the personal responsibility upon which such arrangements also depend.

President Emmanuel Macron made a revealing connection in his address to religious representatives on January 4, 2018. He recalled both Stock’s death in 1948 and the election that year of Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, linking Franco-German reconciliation with Catholic–Orthodox rapprochement. Political and ecclesiastical estrangement appeared within the same field of responsibility.

That association deserves to be revisited during Leo’s journey. The presidential language of European ambition encounters a religious vocabulary of peace, dignity, and fraternity. Both can articulate aspirations that exceed immediate political possibilities. Both face the risk that repetition will substitute for achievement. Can the European dream become so insistent that it loses contact with the people expected to inhabit it?

Leo’s trajectory through the United States, Peru, and Rome gives this encounter another dimension. Europe is being addressed by someone whose pastoral experience cannot be contained within its familiar divisions. Without anticipating his words at Metz, the occasion permits a searching question: can Europe receive counsel from the wider world while reconsidering what remains fruitful in its own inheritance?

The Churches face that question within their daily lives. Wherever Eastern and Western Christians now live as neighbors, inherited boundaries acquire new practical consequences. A parish may preserve language and worship, shelter newcomers, and help families establish themselves. The same attachment can harden into competition for people or reluctance to recognize another community’s legitimate presence.

Orthodox and Eastern Catholic histories remain distinct, and neither can be reduced to a single attitude towards the West. Yet every Church can ask whether fidelity enlarges responsibility towards others. From an Orthodox perspective, liturgical prayer for peace obliges those who utter it to consider the people with whom peace is difficult. Stock’s Catholic priesthood gave his service its concrete form while bringing him towards people beyond his national and religious belonging.

His life offers no easy formula for reconciliation. Nobody can dispose of the suffering of the dead or require survivors to absolve those who injured them. Truth, accountability, and unequal responsibility remain essential. Reconciliation becomes coercive when the wounded are asked to make everyone else comfortable.

Therefore, the significance of Metz lies partly in what follows the speeches. Europe can preserve its monuments, invoke its founders, and celebrate its diversity while struggling to sustain obligations across its divisions. Christian heritage, Jewish memory, and republican principles all become uncertain when admiration for the past leaves the living without protection.

Franz Stock belongs in the distance between Europe’s aspirations and its conduct. His life asks whether an inherited conviction enables someone to approach a person who has every reason to distrust him, and remain responsible when gratitude and success are uncertain.

Whatever Europe hears at Metz, that question will remain after the visitors have departed.