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It is often said that every priest has only one homily. Beneath the humor or the eyes drawn to his written text lies something profoundly true about the human heart. No matter what swirls around us—successes, failures, crises, or joys—when life grows quiet, and the noise recedes, a single desire continues to echo within us. For many parents, it is the well-being of their children. For prisoners, it may be the longing for freedom. For orphans who have never known a home, or for those who grew up surrounded by family, the heart reverberates with the same ache: the desire to be near someone who loves us and knows.
This insight mirrors an Aristotelian principle: if you observe a thing long enough, it will reveal what it truly is. So too with preaching. If you listen to a priest’s homily over time, you begin to hear the steady pulse of his interior life. His deepest convictions, his wounds, his hopes, the place where his heart rests before God—all of it eventually comes to the surface. In that sense, a priest’s “one homily” is not a limitation but a window into the truth he cannot help but proclaim.
Listening to Leo XIV across the first months of his pontificate, one begins to hear the steady pulse of a single conviction rising beneath every text: God comes to us in littleness, and the Church must go there to meet Him. This is not merely a pastoral preference or a rhetorical motif. It is the place where Leo’s heart rests before God, the interior center from which all his preaching flows. In homily after homily, he returns to the same theological grammar: God reveals Himself in humility, poverty, vulnerability, and smallness — and therefore the Church’s credibility depends on her willingness to recognize, honor, and defend those same places in the world.
This theme appears with striking clarity in his homily for the Presentation of the Lord, where he describes Christ entering the Temple “as the son of a poor family… fully sharing in our poverty,” offering Himself with “the disarming strength of his unarmed generosity.” For Leo, this is not a sentimental detail but a revelation of divine logic: the Infinite gives Himself to the finite “in a way so humble that it almost passes unnoticed.” Littleness is not an accident of the Incarnation; it is its method. And because consecrated life mirrors Christ’s own descent, he insists that the young, the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned “hold a sacred place above all else on God’s altar and in his heart.” This is Leo’s heart speaking plainly: the vulnerable are not peripheral to the Church — they are the sanctuary where God dwells.
The same melody resounds in Dilexi Te, where Leo XIV makes explicit what his homilies imply: “Contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.” Here he roots the Church’s preferential love for the poor not in sociological analysis but in Christology itself. Christ identifies Himself “with the lowest ranks of society,” and therefore the Church must do the same. Leo’s heart is revealed in the urgency of his language: the cry of the poor is not simply a social problem but “a cry that… challenges our lives, societies… and the Church” because “on the wounded faces of the poor, we see the suffering of Christ himself.” Littleness becomes sacramental — the place where the Church touches the wounds of the Lord.
Even in moments not explicitly focused on poverty, Leo returns to this same interior center. At the Epiphany, he warns the Church not to fear seekers, strangers, or spiritual wanderers, reminding her that God reveals Himself “in a humble place,” not in the palaces of power. At the Baptism of the Lord, he emphasizes that Christ appears “as the Holy One among sinners,” choosing to stand in the waters with the unclean and the overlooked. And on the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, he describes God’s self-revelation as “unarmed and disarming… as naked and defenseless as a newborn in a cradle,” teaching the world that salvation comes not through domination but through mercy, forgiveness, and welcome.
Taken together, these homilies reveal a single, consistent truth about Leo XIV’s heart: he believes that God’s power is revealed in vulnerability, and that the Church must shape her liturgy, her mission, and her very identity around the small, the fragile, and the forgotten. His “one homily” is the homily of Bethlehem, the homily of the Jordan, the homily of the Temple: God descends into littleness, and the Church must follow Him there.
Here, the vibration of love for the weak and vulnerable pouring out of the Holy Father’s heart encounters the theology of littleness in the liturgy of the Catholic Mass, where the infinite God hides Himself once more—not in thunderous glory, but in the fragile forms of bread and wine, elevated by human hands in a sanctuary echoing the stable of Bethlehem. The priest, standing in persona Christi, becomes the humble servant who breaks and distributes this gift to the least among us, reminding every soul that the Eucharist is the sacrament of littleness: God’s poverty made nourishment for our hunger, His vulnerability our strength.
Pope Leo XIV’s singular homily, then, is no mere personal devotion but a clarion call to the whole Church: to descend with Christ into the peripheries, where the cry of the poor is the voice of the Lord Himself. In a world intoxicated by power and self-sufficiency, Leo’s homily unveils the divine paradox—that true greatness lies in embracing the small, that the Church’s radiance shines brightest when she kneels before the forgotten. To heed this pulse is to reclaim our identity as disciples: not lords of the Temple, but handmaids of the manger, where God’s restless love for the lowly finds its laborers.
Let us, then, listen to the Holy Father’s heart as our own. In every homily, every liturgy, every encounter with the vulnerable, may we proclaim with him: God dwells in littleness, and there we must seek Him—until our hearts rest fully in His.
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