An image of the Christ the Vine mosaic at the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome.On Wednesday, May 21, at Mass, we heard the words of Jesus from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel: “I am the true vine.” These words are part of three chapters of John known as the “Farewell Discourses,” in which Jesus prepares to depart from His disciples in the way they have known Him on earth, He prepares them to carry on the community they have created without Him visibly among them, He prepares them for the struggles ahead, but promises the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, will be among them: God’s presence moving in their midst in a new way.
In the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome, just a few blocks East of the Coliseum, there is a famous mosaic altarpiece that depicts Jesus, the vine.
Created in the twelfth century, sometime between 1102 and 1140, the mosaic depicts Christ, the true vine. On a cross, in the center of the mosaic, Christ is accompanied by Mary and John, and a tree of life sprouts from the foot of his cross. The entire dome of the apse—the domed recess in a church which traditionally houses the altar—is covered in a mosaic of the vine, springing out from Christ. The vine curls into perfect spirals, presenting to the viewer symbols of Christianity, angels and saints. The pattern of the true vine is one you may find cropping up in many altarpieces and church artwork. In San Clemente’s version, flowers grow out of and birds perch upon the tendrils of the vine. Christ’s true vine is indeed bearing much fruit.
I visited the Basilica of San Clemente to spend some time with this mosaic the day after Pope Leo XIV was elected. I sat in a small wooden pew closest to the apse. A group of French pilgrims began Mass in the marble choir next to me.
I was in Rome for the election of Pope Leo XIV, covering the proceedings for U.S. Catholic Magazine. A dozen years before, I had been in Rome, covering Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and the election of Pope Francis for my college magazine.
Although only cardinal electors participate in the conclave, the election of the new pope is something in which the whole Church participates. I felt this strongly twelve years ago, and, perhaps with the renewed media interest in conclaves and the papacy, I felt this universal participation even more strongly this time.
In the weeks between Pope Francis’ death and the beginning of the conclave, Catholic and secular media was filled with line-ups of “papabile”—cardinals who had the potential to become pope. In the United States, we have a hard time believing that the Church works differently than secular politics. And, you know what, that is understandable when so many Catholics have been betrayed or hurt by Christ’s Church.
We all know friends or family members who once sat in church next to us on Sundays and no longer come. Sometimes, our pilgrimage as Christians, as members of an imperfect Church, can feel like a very long Good Friday.
But Good Friday, as we know, is not the end of the story. The mystery of Easter suffused the entire conclave. I think, perhaps, in a particular way for our new pope, who must have undergone a passion and death of some kind finding himself being handed the heaviest key of Peter’s See—the responsibility before God for the souls of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide.
But Pope Leo XIV saw the Paschal Mystery in the poetically timed passing of Pope Francis, on Easter Monday. “I would like all of us to see the passing of our beloved Holy Father Pope Francis and the Conclave as a paschal event,” Pope Leo XIV said in an address to the College of Cardinals. Leo called the moment “providentially-bathed in the light of Easter.” And this described, to me, the feeling of this conclave and election.
The Paschal Mystery, the central mystery of our faith, in which Christ loved us unto death, offering his own life for us, and rose from the dead, opening us for us, the baptized, a new form of life with God. In the second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI called the Resurrection an “ontological leap” meaning, he wrote, a kind of evolutionary great leap forward, “in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.”
Resurrection, in other words, opens up possibilities for human existence that were previously no longer possible.
Being in St. Peter’s Square during the first evening, waiting for the smoke to appear, and then throughout the morning of May 8, waiting for the smoke again, anxiously anticipating the white, feels a lot like Holy Saturday—waiting, all day, for the holy fire of the Easter Vigil to spark at sundown. Holy Saturday is a day of “great silence,” as Pope Benedict XVI called it, a day of anticipation, the “hiddenness of God” about to be revealed in glory. It is a day of waiting in hope—that our expectations are about to be fulfilled.
When the white smoke appeared at 6:08 p.m., Rome time, the thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square erupted into cheering, singing, embracing—a giant shout of Easter joy. All over the world, Catholics—and non-Catholics—told stories of watching the footage and also erupting into joy in the midst of laundry, caring for children, teaching school.
“We have a pope,” the cardinal announced, to great cheers, accompanied by hushing, so that we could hear the new pope’s name. The announcement of the name didn’t provide clarity. Who is Robert Francis Prevost? People wondered.
“Did Americans go crazy in the square?” people have asked me. And perhaps there was a hidden pocket of U.S. citizens celebrating wildly (perhaps the seminarians and priests at the North American College?) but most of us who had happened to read Prevost’s name on the many papabile lists were explaining to our neighbors who he was. There was palpable confusion amidst the joy.
“Peace be to you all,” Pope Leo XIV said to the crowds as he appeared, the words Christ says to the disciples in the twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel, the first time He sees them after the Resurrection.
It was another moment, providentially bathed in the light of Easter.
Jorge Bergoglio was not a name written on my neighbors’ papabile lists when we waited under our umbrellas in St. Peter’s Square on March 13, 2013. “Franciscus” was a papal name no one had anticipated, nor was “Leone XIV.” The Holy Spirit moves in mysterious ways.
In the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, at the beginning of the Farewell Discourses, Christ promises His Church the Holy Spirit, another advocate “who will be with you forever.” We so often put our trust in worldly power, human calculations. But the Holy Spirit is with us, we are the branches still rooted in the true vine. The movements of the Holy Spirit still surprise us, confound pagan wisdom, and even perhaps look like foolishness to the wise of the world, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Greek Christians in Corinth.
The Holy Spirit breathes life into God’s Easter People: and the Church, bathed in the providential waters of Christ’s Resurrection, will always find these new possibilities open up in our walk with God. We are always being made new.
This brings me back to what I said before: that we all participate in the conclave. For the conclave is the work of discernment, and the discernment of the cardinal electors is, in no way, separate from our own prayers. As the entire world prayed for the election, for the new pope, the grace that is the sharing in the life of God, the Holy Spirit, moves through the church, enlightening the minds of those who seek wisdom, seek grace.
Each baptized person has a role to play in the life of the Church. In our daily lives, we focus on the material world: material actions, those ruled by the laws of physics and cause and effect: you write a name on a piece of paper and put it into a box, and those actions result in a new pope. But, in Christ’s Church, our spiritual actions—our prayers, our sacrifices, our silent participation—often invisible and overlooked, are essential makers of history.
When the pope steps onto the loggia, the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, and greets the world for the first time, I could almost palpably feel the rush of prayers supporting him. “No one can fulfill their vocation without the other vocations,” a cardinal told me, “no exceptions, even the Holy Father.”
At our house, St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker in Allison Hill, we held a roundtable with friends and neighbors on Monday evening, sharing our experiences of the conclave. We all shared our experiences of those joyful days following Pope Leo XIV’s election, and the conversations it sparked with neighbors and loved ones. We shared our hopes for the Church, many of which reflected Leo XIV’s first words in his Urbi et Orbi address, the night he was elected. “We want to be a synodal Church, a Church that walks, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close especially to those who suffer,” the new pope said.
In the United States, one sign of hope I see is that several political commentators are learning more about the papacy: that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, not a Democrat or a Republican, not a politician like other earthly rulers. No pope is perfect—no Christian is perfect—but the pope as a spiritual leader remains a sign of hope as a sign of our unity in Christ—”in that place, we are one,” as Leo’s papal crest declares.
“Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,” Christ said in the Gospel. As I meditated on the mosaic of Christ, the true vine, and the Church as that vine, I felt that the events of this Easter season have truly been marked with that after-effect of Resurrection: hope. Throughout the paschal mystery of these weeks’ events—the Good Friday of a beloved pope’s death, the Holy Saturday of waiting for the hidden vicar of Christ to emerge, and the joyful celebration of a new life with a new pope–we remain, always, the one flock of the one, good shepherd.
(Renée Roden, MTS, is the author of Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City, due out in August 2025 with Liturgical Press. She lives at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker in Harrisburg.)
By Renée Roden, Special to The Witness
