A few days after his election, Pope Leo XIV met with members of the media who had been covering the event. While friendly, it was a formal papal audience and not a press conference. Leo did not field questions from the gathered journalists, nor did anyone expect him to. My colleagues and I on America’s temporary Rome team were simply happy to be there at the end of perhaps the most intense three weeks of media work we would ever experience.

As the pope was leaving, journalists positioned themselves along his path out of the audience hall, calling out questions. Robert Sherman of NewsNation asked the American pope if he had a message for the church in the United States. Leo, smiling, answered, “Many. God bless you all.”

Many journalists chuckled with respect at Leo’s deft handling of the question. While it amounted to a deflection and (mostly) a “no comment,” it honored and acknowledged the concerns behind the question, with the combination of reserve and good humor that have characterized Leo’s first months on the chair of Peter.

In September, we began to hear some of these many messages, in an interview conducted by Elise Ann Allen of Crux, as part of her biography of the pope. Leo’s responses to the few questions that touched on the United States demonstrated a realistic understanding of the American church.

Asked about what difference it would make to be the first pope from the United States, he answered that he hoped “it will make a difference eventually with the bishops in the United States,” referring to the relationship between church and politics. He said that his American roots would mean that “people can’t say, like they did about Francis, ‘He doesn’t understand the United States, he just doesn’t see what’s going on.’”

I made a similar observation in a piece I wrote for The New York Times after Leo’s election, arguing that when U.S. Catholics disagree with the pope along partisan lines, as they came to do more and more over the course of Francis’ pontificate, “whether over immigration with the right or abortion with the left, it will not be as easy to dismiss him as someone who does not understand American culture or politics.”

Leo said that he will avoid partisan politics but will raise “real Gospel issues.” He gave the example of a conversation he had with Vice President JD Vance, himself a Catholic convert, about “human dignity and how important that is for all people, wherever you’re born.”

In response to a follow-up question about how he might engage President Trump, Leo answered that, as with any government, that role belonged more to the local leadership of the church. He referred to the letter Francis sent in February of this year to the U.S. bishops expressing concern about the president’s mass deportation agenda and the treatment of immigrants. Leo commented that he was “happy to see how the American bishops picked that up, and some of them were courageous enough to go with that” and that he saw his role as pope to engage with the bishops along these lines.

On one level, this could be read as a form of deflection—it allowed Leo to avoid explaining directly how he would engage Mr. Trump—but on several other levels, it starts to deliver the many messages the Holy Father has for the church in his native country.

Francis’ letter to the U.S. bishops on mass deportation was, to put it mildly, a bombshell. It is not common for the pope to write to a country’s bishops en masse about a political issue. Nor is it common for such a letter to seemingly respond to, and correct, an elected official’s interpretation of a theological concept, but Francis’ letter did just that with respect to Mr. Vance’s use of the ordo amoris.

Leo’s choice to refer to the letter, I think, is significant. We already knew that prior to his election, Cardinal Robert Prevost was paying attention to this issue. Some of the final posts on an X account under his name mentioned the letter, including one sharing a piece I wrote about it, arguing that the letter asked American Catholics whether “we judge our politics according to the Gospel or the other way around.”

Even more significantly, given that the letter was sent by Francis to the U.S. bishops, it is almost certain that Cardinal Prevost as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops would have been involved in drafting and reviewing the letter. Back in February, a number of Catholic commentators dismissed and rejected Francis’ intervention as lacking understanding of the situation on the ground; one even went so far as to describe the letter as Pope Francis’ “suicide note.”

Leo did not need to refer to Francis’ letter. Nothing in the question that he was asked invoked it. Instead, he almost went out of his way to remind us of the letter, describing it as a model of papal engagement with a political issue, especially because of how it asked U.S. bishops to take responsibility.

The U.S. bishops’ conference will meet for a plenary assembly early in November. Among many other issues, American Catholics will be looking to see how the bishops continue their advocacy for the dignity of our migrant brothers and sisters under threat of deportation. So, it seems, will the first pope from the United States.