An ‘Aide-Memoire’ for Pope Leo, by Robert Royal
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Demonstrators at Place de la République after the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices, 1/7/2015 [source: Godefroy Troude via Wikipedia]. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
By Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, December 15, 2025
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West , and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.
Friends: I want to thank all of you who gave generously to our end-of-year fundraising campaign – for both your material and moral support. It means a great deal to us to hear from you about how much you appreciate our work. We strive to make TCT as good as it can be, every day, 365 days a year. Your encouragement helps keep us at our tasks. And we hope to do even more and even better in the year to come. (As a bit of a foretaste, I’ve written a more extensive column this morning that I hope will help shape several conversations in the Church, here and abroad, in 2026.) We’re in basically good shape financially now, looking ahead, and given the continuing gifts we expect to receive between now to the end of the year. So thanks to all our readers, donors and not, for keeping TCT alive and flourishing. Keep reading. Spread the word about The Catholic Thing. – Robert Royal
Offering advice to a pope is a presumptuous thing – for anyone. In the Church of synodality, however, where everyone is supposed to have a voice – and be listened to – perhaps not so presumptuous as once upon a time. Still, such counsel should be offered in a spirit of loyalty and concern, as a kind of aide-memoire – in the classic diplomatic sense of providing a leader with information and analysis. Not about dogmas, Creeds, and long-settled matters such as any pope should already know. But as a help in understanding how things, important things, stand, which a pontiff may not be adequately aware of, shaped as he is by what the French elegantly call a déformation professionelle, and what we Americans, more technologically minded, regard as an “information silo.”Related posts
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