Toronto Archbishop Francis Leo’s elevation to Cardinal this week gives added cause for the celebration of Thanksgiving this weekend. 

It’s also a source of amazement that he has been Archbishop of Canada’s largest Roman Catholic jurisdiction only since March 25, 2023, meaning he will have been its episcopal head for a mere 20 months and one week when he joins 20 other new Cardinals at the Consistory in Rome on Dec. 8.

With the indefatigable pace he keeps while attending events in the Archdiocese, publishing pastoral letters and calling us constantly to give glory to Our Lord and honour to our Blessed Mother, it sometimes seems he has been with us forever. As much as his personal effort and focus have contributed to that sense, though, so has his place in the clerical legacy of the Archdiocese: still relatively new yet permanently conjoined to those who have come before. 

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It’s a lineage the Register brought attention to in our editorial following Archbishop Leo’s installation at St. Michael’s Cathedral in a time span that can be measured in both weeks and centuries. We wrote:

“Catholics across Canada can find joy in the invocation of the memory and spirit of Bishop Michael Power during the installation Mass for Toronto’s new Archbishop Francis Leo on March 25.

Power laid the cornerstone in 1845 for the very Cathedral in which Archbishop Leo received the pastoral crozier passed on by Cardinal Thomas Collins, who retired in February after 16 years of service shepherding the Roman Catholic faithful of Toronto’s diocese.

But in referencing Power, neither Leo nor Collins were giving only a homiletic nod to local history. Far from indulging nostalgia, they reminded us as Catholics of the way the service of perfect freedom that is Christian faith binds past and present immediately and irrevocably to Eternity.

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Power exemplifies such service for reasons greater than the ecclesial administrative act of carving the diocese of Toronto out of the diocese of Kingston, or for constructing the church building marking the progress of Catholic pilgrimage in Canada. Rather, he gave his life from the age of 12 to the vocation of priestly servant of God, first in Quebec and Montreal through seminary, ordination and missionary life, then to the newly created See of Toronto.

The word “gave” is literal. Power died in 1847 knowing the risk of tending typhus-stricken Irish famine migrants as they fled English tyranny whose atrocious cruelty and heartless monstrosity remains a sordid stain on human history.

Yet vital to Power’s legacy is that the son of Irish immigrants became our first English-speaking, Canadian-born Catholic bishop. Dying young, he caused a cathedral to be built that would, 178 years later, be the very house of God where a son of Italian immigrants to Canada became the newest Archbishop of Toronto.

No wonder Cardinal Collins noted in his address during the installation Mass that he had accompanied Leo to the crypt below St. Michael’s Cathedral where Power’s earthly remains are contained. He did so not as a kind of orientation tour, but to pray and meditate with his successor archbishop; to make a shared invocation to the memory and spirit of both the Cathedral’s earthly builder and also its Heavenly grounding in Jesus Christ, the angels and saints, our Blessed Mother Mary, and the apostolic continuity that is the creedal core of Catholic faith.

For his part, included in his homage to Michael Power was Archbishop Leo’s own recollection of an influential priest who, upon learning that young Francis was headed to seminary, stopped him at the sacristy door and told him: ‘There is nothing more beautiful than to give your youth to the Lord.’

Now 51, Archbishop Leo has gone on to devote not only his youth but his life to the Lord, as did Cardinal Collins, as did Michael Power, as do all the faithful clergy and laity.

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This, Easter reminds us, is the power and glory of our Holy Mother Church, our hope, seat of wisdom, and ultimate joy.”

The only amendments — updates, really — to be made are that Archbishop Leo is now a still youthful 53, and it is Thanksgiving that reminds us to give thanks for his sharing the light of all who have faithfully served before.