A Divine Love That Serves

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COZ151: What does it mean that the Creator of the universe got on his knees to wash the feet of his creation — and then said now you do this?

That question sits at the heart of Pope Leo’s Holy Thursday homily, delivered at the Basilica of St. John Lateran as he emphasised his identity as Bishop of Rome. Lindsay Sant and Lino Saubolle unpack the homily in detail, tracing two inseparable realities Pope Leo holds together: the washing of the feet and the Eucharist.

Pope Leo draws on the Greek word hypodeigma — “that which is shown before your eyes” — to argue that foot-washing is more than a moral example. It is Christ showing his entire way of life. And receiving the Eucharist, Pope Leo insists, is an act of consent: I will wash the feet of my brothers and sisters.

Woven through the homily is a warning from Pope Benedict XVI: we are tempted to seek a God of success, not a God of the Passion. The God who washes feet is the God who overturns our distorted image of power. True omnipotence, Pope Leo says, looks like a servant with a basin and a towel. The Creator kneels before his creation.

Lindsay and Lino reflect on what this means for a world shaped by war and rivalry. Drawing on Pope Leo’s vision of the human family — united by Christ’s filial adoption of humanity — and St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of love as “willing the good of the other,” they close with a reflection from their parish priest, Fr. Joby, whose Holy Week meditation centred on a single phrase: a love more powerful than death.

Then Caroline Knight joins in a pre-recorded segment to report on a striking development in cryobiology. Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Germany froze mouse hippocampal tissue at -150°C for seven days and successfully revived it — using vitrification (turning liquid into a glass-like solid without ice crystals) and a hyper-oncotic washout protocol. What they witnessed was long-term potentiation: the cellular mechanism of learning, firing again. Caroline and Lindsay discuss what this means for organ preservation medicine, the ethical questions raised by human applications, and how close science fiction is getting to science fact.

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Catholics of Oz