Habemus papam… qui nuntia in socialis instrumentis mittit.

In addition to ruminating on his regnal name and reflecting on his first public appearance, the internet is busy scouring now-Pope Leo XIV’s old X/Twitter account. It’s not an unreasonable use of time. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there. But one retweet in particular caught my eye. It’s about “the protocol by which we will all be judged”:

Our new Holy Father seems to take seriously the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (also called the Judgment of the Nations). I can picture a few heavenly friends grinning ear to ear—first among them, of course, St. Charles de Foucauld and Pope Francis.

Both Br. Charles and Papa Francisco told us to accept these dominical words in as straightforward a manner as possible. One told us to read them “without making commentaries,” while the other said to go to them “sine glossa… without any ‘ifs or buts’” (Gaudete et Exsultate 97). After plunging into these texts as deeply as I could in private during Lent, I’ve taken a major push towards emphasizing their importance in the past month, even in the past week. And I think now more than ever this was the right move.

Without commentaries, without glosses—to these two demanding and uncompromising ways of framing the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, we can now add a third: “the protocol by which we will all be judged.” Well, except we already had it. This is a phrase from a 2015 audience of Pope Francis with the consecrated persons of the Diocese of Rome and repeated in one of his morning meditations at Santa Marta later that year. It’s a Bergoglianism. But still a Prevostian retweet.

The angels and saints in heaven who love us and look after the littlest ones are always in the presence of our heavenly Father. They smile—I think—and I smile, too.

Habemus papam… qui nuntium de protocollo per quod omnes iudicabuntur secundum cap. XXV Evangelii secundum Matthaeum remisit.