The title of this post is provocative. In truth, though, it’s little more than a welding together of two sentences in Pope Leo’s most recent Angelus. While he’s on vacation resting at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy Father is, again this year, using his time there to put out work and words that are very meaningful to me.

Yesterday’s Angelus took me by surprise. It’s not that I disagree with what Leo said. I just find his phrasing even more direct, if not confrontational, than I’ve been on a certain topic. And I think I’ve not been shy. Of course, though, as usual, I would recommend reading the whole papal address in full. What I want to draw attention to is just what caught my eye.

The Holy Father shows himself not averse to the deep waters surrounding littleness and vulnerability. Of course, he doesn’t use the latter word. Divine vulnerability is a Maritainism (among others). Leo doesn’t speak that way. But he does say quite specifically that God’s M.O. is and always has been “discreet love, by which he leaves us free to accept or reject him.” (Is that not a way of loving that could only be described as not invulnerable—that is, in shorthand, vulnerable?) At any rate, Leo’s rationale for the divine M.O. is found in Jesus’ parables:

Jesus warns us against the temptation of thinking that God is a powerful figure who imposes himself by force, who takes over and dominates, or who arrives triumphantly. Instead, God favors smallness, a sign of his discreet love, by which he leaves us free to accept or reject him. His love makes its presence felt even among the weeds, acts in a hidden and invisible way like the smallest of all seeds, and leavens the dough without making a sound. (Leo XIV, Angelus, 19 July 2026)

Leo also is very clear that this conception or imagination of God has ramifications for our “model” of life and thus our social actions as Christians, among members of the Church and in society, at the micro and personal level, at the macro and systemic:

We imagine a strong and powerful God, and, unfortunately, we also model our way of being Christians and way of being the Church on this image. (Leo XIV, Angelus, 19 July 2026)

In reality, however, we need to turn this around:

God’s way of acting must also become the way in which we live, both as individuals and as the Church, amidst the reality that surrounds us. We are called to adopt a Gospel-centered approach, without hastily opposing others through arrogant judgments, without imposing ourselves through power and force, and without losing trust in God’s work. (Leo XIV, Angelus, 19 July 2026)

To do all this, we need to challenge the God whose face in our imagination betokens strength and power alone and who operates without “discreet love, by which he leaves us free to accept or reject him.” We need to escape this limited and limiting view of God. If we can, we can then embrace and be thrown into the embrace of the God who loves (for there is no use avoiding this terminology in the long run) vulnerably.

Such a shift can change a lot of things. It will change a lot of things. The change, however, will take time. Systemic things are complicated, and our personal involvement in them is messy. But the implication of a God who loves vulnerably is, should everything come to a point, the end of a lot of our blind allegiances and destructive behaviours.

As I’ve been saying for years, if we imagine God as powerful and also in every way invulnerable—even though it flies in the face of our freedom to accept or reject God—this ultimately isn’t about theory, at least in the sense that good metaphysics or theology prevents us from saying anything different. I don’t think that’s true at all. Good metaphysics and theology acknowledge that we’re free, in the God-given freedom that we have, to accept or reject God’s offers. So, the truth is: there’s no philosophical or theological barrier. At the end of the day, our hesitation here is a social question. Our resistance boils down to how we frame and use power. We’ve got some addictions. They blind us to seeing clearly.

Quoting oneself is incredibly gauche, I know, but I don’t think I can do any better today than to refer back to an essay from 20 months ago. To make it just that tiny bit more gauche, though, I’ll italicize some key overlaps in the Leonine vocabulary or emphasis and my own.

After suggesting that mercy and vulnerability eventually encounter the same intellectual puzzle when applied to God, but that we embrace the one Divine Name and shun the other, I wrote:

The way I see things, bias for Divine Mercy over Divine Vulnerability eventually comes back to the ideologies and structures of sin that are manifest in, e.g., colonialism, capitalist structures, environmental destruction, the abuse crisis, racism, misogyny—basically, ideologies and structures of sin that (supposedly) orthodox Christians are emphatically not known for getting a handle on, not even a theoretical grip, let alone a practical one. Those are the real reasons why we, as a community, say that God is Merciful but not the Most Vulnerable. It has little to do with doctrinal correctness, intelligibility, and truth. It’s not about keeping our thoughts on the straight and narrow. At a collective level, it’s all about patterns of evil. It’s about power.

If vulnerability is just something about the historical Jesus’ Humanity or about the humanity of the members of Christ’s Body spread out in time, well, that’s one thing. We have to think about it. It might present some difficulties now and then. But there remain ways around treating vulnerability as good in itself. It’s at best a limited good. It’s not an uncreated one. The historical Jesus and the continuing members of his Body may be vulnerable—but the divine face here is just power. Loving power, we say. But invulnerable power. In the Divinity, we always have, or so we tell ourselves, a pattern of power without vulnerability. We can at times fall back on that. Our exemplar bifurcates. An instability emerges. In our theory and in our living, we can seesaw between the model of Jesus and what we tell ourselves is the model of God. Consciously or unconsciously, the possibility is open. The pattern repeats itself. And some little voice inside says it’s deifying, so it’s Christian. We call it love.

If, however, God himself, in his very essence or M.O., is more vulnerable than we could possibly conceive, then that changes everything.

Our aspiration integrates. The vulnerability that Jesus manifested, and which he gives preference for in the wounded and the marginalized, is not some kind of discontinuous addition to God, but rather an expression of God the Most Vulnerable. No more bifurcation. No more instability. No more seesaw.

Without so much as a flick of a finger, every last possible justification for domination—colonialism, capitalism, treating the earth as we do, clericalism, corruption, cover-up, racism, misogyny—shatters.

We have a choice to make. There is today an urgent need to re-express the Christian message as one about vulnerability. And that touches the question of God—who is the most vulnerable of beings, who remains eternally omnipotent and of infinite happiness, and who can only then be described as transforming, in his unquenchable fire, all the potential infinities of his suffering of our sin, into joy, not over time, but as if at an infinite rate in the pure intensity of eternity. It’s a mystery. But we either choose this mystery or we leave the Christian message to fall to the ground, for it can no longer be propped up by one-sided pictures of God’s power that have for far too long been used to support so many ideologies and structures of sin characteristic of our age. (from the post God’s Love is Rejected—So Why Not Say God is Vulnerable Before Us?, 14 November 2024)

The question, in the end, isn’t whether the model of God that Jesus reveals is acceptable to us and our intellectual priors. It’s whether we’ll choose that model or, rejecting God’s offer, prefer our own.

Leo says: Choose God’s own. In big things and small, choose God’s own.