Cardinal Fernández says Pope Leo XIV is continuing Francis’ legacy, not undoing it

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Cardinal Fernández says Pope Leo XIV is continuing Francis’ legacy, not undoing it
Cardinal Fernández pushed back on claims of a hard break with the direction of Pope Francis, 

saying Leo XIV has asked bishops ‘to continue to receive the magisterium of Francis.’



Pope Leo XIV
Riccardo De Luca - Update/Shutterstock

Apr 16, 2026
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Senior Vatican Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández has said Pope Leo XIV is continuing the legacy of Pope Francis.

On April 13, Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated in an interview given to Italian newspaper Il Giornale that it is inaccurate to claim Pope Leo XIV intends to overturn his predecessor’s pontificate, emphasizing instead continuity through specific initiatives and teachings promoted within the Church. The interview marked the approaching first anniversary of Pope Francis’s death, on April 21.

“Every pope has his own personal style and priorities, but to say that Pope Leo wants to erase what was done during the pontificate of Francis is dishonest,” Fernández said.

According to the Argentine cardinal, “One year later, Francis is not yet underground,” and his legacy is more relevant than ever. Pope Leo XIV asks the entire Church to “follow the lesson of humility” that Francis would have imparted with his life and his papacy.

When asked about “a decision or a text” by Francis that, according to Fernández, “changed the way of living the Church,” the cardinal replied: “The fact of applying the hierarchy of truth not only to ecumenism, but to all preaching and evangelization.”

The so-called “hierarchy of truth” is a theological interpretation of the Decree on Ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio of the Second Vatican Council (no. 11), according to which all the truths of the Catholic faith derive from the same divine source, but not all would have the same weight in relation to the core of the Gospel.

Unitatis Redintegratio asserts that “the whole doctrine must be clearly presented in its entirety” and that “nothing is more foreign to ecumenism than that false irenicism, which distorts the purity of Catholic doctrine and obscures its genuine and precise meaning.” Moreover, the decree recalls that, “When comparing doctrines it should be remembered that there exists an order or hierarchy in the truths of Catholic doctrine, by reason of their different relation to the foundation of the Christian faith.”

In the traditional sense, this means that Catholic dogmas proceed from the fundamental articles of the Creed as conclusions proceed from their premises.

In the neo-modernist sense, adopted by Francis, this concept has been interpreted to mean that some truths would be fundamental and necessary, others less so. This interpretation was condemned under the name of “latitudinarianism” by Pope Pius IX in his 1864 encyclical Quanta cura and in the Syllabus of Errors.

According to what Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, the Church should not “be obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines,” but should focus on what is “more beautiful, greater, more necessary”: the kerygma, the Christian proclamation, which – according to the late pope – reduces to the fact that “God loves all men.”

In this sense, Francis extended the concept of the hierarchy of truths, applying it not only to relations with non‑Catholics but also to relations among Catholics themselves.

Amid the interview, Fernández decried “traditionalist groups” who he said “resist” Pope Francis’s “condemnation of the death penalty.” Even with this, regarding the danger of erasing or forgetting what was taught by Francis, the cardinal said there would be no risk under Leo:

Pope Leo has expressed in various ways the need to continue to receive the magisterium of Francis. For example, to us cardinals, before the consistory, he asked us to read Evangelii gaudium again, and then invited us to reflect on its application. Now he has convened the presidents of the Episcopal Conferences to resume the reception of Amoris laetitia. Certainly, for those who rejected all his teaching or for those who received it only in appearance, [Francis’s] pontificate will have been only a bad parenthesis (forgetting the hermeneutic of continuity).

However, the concept of a “hermeneutic of continuity” developed by Pope Benedict XVI serves to avoid a reading of the Second Vatican Council as a rupture with respect to the standing Tradition. Fernández, instead, employed the expression in a different way, that is, to describe a supposedly necessary pastoral continuity and magisterial direction between Francis and Leo.

Again, according to Fernández, the point from which to begin again in order to communicate the faith anew in a secularized society would be “the experience of a friendship with Christ that enlightens, offers meaning, with the certainty of being loved.” The concept of experience and feeling as foundations of religious life, superior to faith and Tradition, are among the fixed points of modernism, as set forth and condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907).