Pope Leo XIV recently dabbled in one of his predecessor’s old tricks. At an October 1 event at Castel Gandolfo celebrating the tenth anniversary of the late Francis’s paean to Mother Earth, Laudato Si’, Pope Leo got up to some highly questionable shenanigans with Arnold Schwarzenegger (famous for his movie roles blowing people’s heads off) and a group of Indians. It smacked of a pagan ritual more than a little. I thought that the ghost of Pachamama would be laid to rest by Leo, but now it appears that Leo may be even more of a Pachamama-ist than Francis was. As if to drive home the pagan-chic pose of yet another Roman pontiff, the pinnacle of the event featured the Bishop of Rome solemnly blessing a hunk of ice. (Vatican News coverage of the event is here.)

Robert Francis Prevost, aka Leo XIV, is the Vicar of Christ. The name change signifies something very important. It is only by virtue of Christ’s saving power that Leo has a job, or that his employer, the Catholic Church, exists in the first place. So let’s start from there and try to get things back on track.

What is Christ’s saving power? The power to save sinful people from the fires of Hell, to bring wayward souls back to the fold of the Heavenly Father. How did Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, effect this? He overcame death after being murdered on an outcropping of rock outside Jerusalem. His broken body hung from two splintery beams. His blood ran down His face and into His eyes. Those who had tortured Him laughed at Him as He suffered. Most of His “friends,” seeing this, ran away in disgust and fear.

That’s the perspective. Christ’s saving act, salvific for all time, is the only reason Leo or any of the other people in the Church hierarchy should be getting up in the morning. Their job is to go out into the world so that Christ can save more souls. Period. Creation is the ground they walk on as they go about doing Christ’s work. The earth is their platform, not part of their flock. The rocks and trees and rivers are background at best. The goal, always, is to preach Christ crucified so that Easter may come for all.

To put it another way, Christ could have died on any rock on any planet in the universe. He chose to die on this planet. Why? Because this is where the people are. The universe is doomed. It can’t be saved, and God doesn’t want to save it anyway. It will end in fire or ice, I know not which, but it will end. What Christ wants are the souls at bay in it. It is for those that Christ thirsts. To hell with everything else. The material is immaterial. It’s the immaterial, the soul, that matters.

In blessing a chip of glacier, or whatever the groovy ice sculpture in the Vatican was, Pope Leo upends the hierarchy of which he is a part, the hierarchy Christ instituted to accomplish His one mission: the salvation of man. Leo may think he is being earthy, but all he is doing is sullying his station and leading the flock astray. We human beings are royalty down here in the fallen material universe. We are princes and princesses, heirs of kingly blood. God made the world, so we must be mindful of its borrowed nature. We must not defile what is not ours to ruin. But for all that, the world is just a venue. We, humans, are God’s only prize in this mortal dimension. To treat ice and other created detritus as worthy of the papal blessing is to invert the hierarchy that Christ Himself ordained.

It’s always the saving of souls that is at issue. To wit, blessing water is licit because Christ was baptized in water, and so, therefore, are we. Blessing ice is stupid, though, because nobody gets baptized in ice. It’s an insult to the Master to act as though He won’t be able to tell the difference.

Pope Leo, the Iceman, stoops too low in recreating Francis’s pagan clowning. Leo gets “earthy” with mere creation, drawing attention away from the saving of the human soul — the only job that Leo or any other churchman has. The Iceman slummeth. He acts beneath the dignity of his station, and the dignity of the human person, by pretending as though hunks of ice are worthy of the blessings that come, not from Leo, or from glaciers, but from almighty God.

Get your head screwed on straight, Your Holiness. Your holiness is not yours to squander on stuff. It’s not yours in any event. It’s God’s. And it has been loaned to you, sealed by the suffering of the Second Person of the Trinity, so that you might bring souls back to Him. The ice is nothing, and you ought not to mock God by pretending otherwise.