By Robert Royal.

The world is still a bit giddy over what happened in Rome the past few weeks. And rightly so. I've been present in the Urbs Aeterna over decades, for a couple of conclaves, and many Vatican events. As I recently confessed (here), these past dozen years I've felt great weariness and distaste, for obvious reasons, at all that Church business. But I have to record that the emotion that greeted Leo XIV when he stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter's was - in both intensity and quality (whoever expected to hear Italians shouting il papa americano!) - like nothing I've ever seen. I felt it myself, deeply, too. And yet my own most intense experience in Rome this trip came prior to the papal election: at an Eastern Rite Catholic liturgy, which I think says something not only about the current form of the Mass but about some fundamental questions now facing our new Pope Leo.

Thanks to Bob Moynihan, who writes Inside the Vatican, for publicizing that liturgy at Santa Maria in Trastevere, which is celebrated Sunday evenings. The church itself is one of the earliest in Rome (the original layout probably goes back to around 340 AD, with some elements even a century earlier). And its many beauties were augmented in the High Middle Ages with radiant mosaics in gold and various colors. I'd been there many times for the usual Masses in Italian and appreciated it as a solid local parish with large numbers of children. But this Eastern Rite Mass floored me, literally, in the sense that it brought me to a grounded yet exalted place that I don't think I've touched since the pre-Vatican II high Latin Masses I remember witnessing as a young boy.

One of the things that many of us have noticed about Pope Leo is the way he seems grounded - "based" in the current slang - in his spiritual formation as an Augustinian and in what seems a manly and genuine serenity. One Chicagoan who knows him a bit told me, "At least he's not crazy." That is probably setting too low a bar for the successor to Pope Francis, but we're right to expect some great things given the more traditional way Leo has conducted himself - his traditional vestments on the loggia, his careful celebrations of the liturgies, and his well thought-out and delivered remarks at every event to date. Even if he continues some of the rather messy things Francis set in motion, there's a good chance that he will bring to them more discipline, substance, and - dare one say - Catholicity.

But he has some steep hills to climb. Several commentators have expressed the hope that he will bring back Pope Benedict XVI's openness to the Traditional Latin Mass, which there's reason to think he might. Given the calmness he seems to be deliberately cultivating - not an artificial media strategy but something that seems to radiate from his basic personality - I'd be surprised if he were to do that right away. But early indications are that he seems to believe that Francis moved too far into simplifying liturgies, which inspired no one, despite the intention to suggest humility. We know that many young people have been coming to the Church lately for firmer teaching about how to live their lives and, often enough, for the very Latin liturgies that were allegedly diving a synodal Church.

It will be interesting to watch how Leo handles all this as well as how he intends his papacy, which has deliberately reached back to the great Leo XIII, to engage our postmodern world. Even in his early remarks, the American pope has shown a remarkable grasp of what we're facing - not only the longstanding rejection of religion as untenable and irrelevant in a scientific and technological age - but a time marked by the breakdown of belief even in science and technology and all the institutions that make civilization possible.

As many Catholics know, Leo XIII basically inaugurated modern Catholic Social Doctrine with his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum. The very title of that work suggested two things. It can be...