On Holy Thursday, Leo XIV washed the feet of 12 Roman priests in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral church of the bishop of Rome. To an outside eye, it might look like a liturgical detail. In fact, it marked one of the clearest signals yet of where the new pope wants to place the center of his pontificate: not in rupture, but in the restoration of form.
Under Francis, the same rite had been given a different setting and a different emotional direction. It was taken out of Lateran ceremony and brought into spaces of vulnerability — prisons, refugee centers, nursing homes. In the first weeks of his papacy, Francis washed the feet of women and Muslims, and later widened the rules to allow the ritual to include a broader range of the faithful. Humility, in that vision, moved outward, toward the margins.
Leo XIV has not reversed that theology of service. But he has sharply changed the addressee of the symbol. This time, the gesture was directed above all toward the clergy. Among the twelve were eleven priests he himself had ordained last year, along with the rector of Rome’s major seminary. This was no longer the language of expanding the boundaries of the rite. It was the language of strengthening the priestly body at a moment of fatigue and fragility.
By Deykom’s preliminary assessment, Leo XIV is not rejecting Francis’s ethic of service so much as redirecting it. If the previous pope used the ritual to show that the Church must kneel before those pushed to the edges of the world, the new pope is suggesting something different: that the Church itself now needs to be gathered and steadied from within. Humility remains. But it is now being used less to displace the institutional center than to reinforce it.
That is why the return to St. John Lateran matters, and why its timing matters just as much. In the days before the rite, Leo XIV offered a prayer intention for priests going through crisis, loneliness, doubt and exhaustion. In that context, the washing of priests’ feet no longer reads as a simple restoration of ceremony. It becomes a public act of reassurance and moral support for those carrying the daily burden of parish life.
Here lies the deepest contrast between the two papal styles. Francis turned the ritual into a drama of nearness: the pope went where the Church seemed least protected and broke inherited boundaries there. Leo turns it into a drama of order: the same act is folded back into the chair of the bishop of Rome, the priesthood and the continuity of liturgical life. It is no less political. Its politics are simply aimed not at disruption, but at stabilization.
For a Catholic Church worn down by years of internal polarization, that signal carries unusual weight. Some Catholics saw the previous pontificate as an overdue opening. Others saw it as a destabilizing loosening of form. Leo XIV appears to be offering a third way: not a repudiation of his predecessor, but a careful restoration of institution, ritual and predictability.
That is why this Holy Thursday should not be read as a minor Vatican correction or as a symbolic concession to traditionalists. It was a deliberate emphasis in the first major liturgical season of the new papacy. Leo XIV made clear that he wants to speak the language of service, but to do so from within the institution rather than against it. That may prove to be the defining mark of his pontificate: not the breaking of symbols, but their disciplined return to the center.
