The World’s Pope
A geographically and ideologically diverse papal conclave finished its work in two days and four rounds of voting, elevating Cardinal Robert Prevost to the papacy and inaugurating the pontificate of Leo XIV. The world learned when Leo appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s that the Catholic Church had its first U.S.-born pope. “Americano?” some incredulous observers among the thousands gathered in St. Peter’s Square were heard to ask. Yes, though as the Vatican itself made clear, the second American pope, whose immediate predecessor also hailed from the same landmass stretching from southernmost Chile to northernmost Canada.
Other signs of continuity with Francis’s papacy soon emerged, to the delight of some and the dismay of others—including no small number of Prevost’s native countrymen. Leo pointedly used the words “synodality” and “dialogue.” He forcefully restated the Christian obligation to care for the vulnerable. In his May 10 address to the College of Cardinals, he called for renewal of “our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.” He then quoted Francis’s Evangelii gaudium, highlighting that document’s emphasis on, among other things, “the return to the primacy of Christ in proclamation”; collegiality and synodality; attention to the sensus fidei, including popular piety; care for the least and the rejected; and “dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities.”
Then there is his chosen name, which the new pope said was inspired by the last Leo—the nineteenth-century pontiff who founded modern Catholic social teaching. Leo XIV made it clear that he intends to apply Leo XIII’s ideas to some of the twenty-first century’s most pressing concerns. “Pope Leo XIII addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Leo XIV explained. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” Drawing on Leo XIII’s historic encyclical Rerum novarum to confront the unprecedented and unpredictable impacts of AI lends doctrinal heft and urgency to an effort that, perhaps understandably, has lacked a clear organizing principle until now. It is also inspiring: there is indeed a wealth of Catholic social teaching for the new pope to draw from, and for many more people around the world to be made aware of.
Prevost’s cosmopolitan biography (though born and raised in Chicago, he spent decades as a missionary in Peru, where he became a bishop, and later headed a dicastery in the Vatican), along with the Trump administration’s abandonment of the postwar global order, complicates the notion of what an “American pope” means for the Church and the world. The very idea was long considered impossible. Prior to the conclave, Robert Barron, the bishop of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, told an interviewer that the next pope would not be from the United States, quoting the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago: “Until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.” Barron himself added: “We’re so dominant that they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the Church.”
Does that mean the Church believes the United States is no longer dominant? Is Leo’s election a welcome thumb in the eye of Donald Trump, whose policies and priorities are so often at odds with Christian teaching? Is Leo a “woke Marxist puppet” sent to undermine American values? Questions like these have driven discussion of Leo XIV in the United States. It’s a symptom of American narcissism that we believe the election of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to be all about us. Catholic doctrine, as many rightly point out, does not map neatly onto American partisan politics. The College of Cardinals, guided by the Holy Spirit, did not make their decision based on the president’s latest moral offense or the vice president’s travesties of Catholic doctrine. Nor was Leo elected only to address the issues that so roil the Catholic Church in the United States, like women’s ordination or the Latin Mass. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop emeritus of Washington D.C., said after Leo’s election that the conclave “was not a continuation of the American election,” but was driven by “a desire to strengthen the Christian faith among God’s people.” Many cardinals cited pragmatic issues as well, including the need for a capable hand to guide the Vatican bureaucracy. By many accounts, Leo is a competent manager, about whom it is literally said: “He runs a great meeting.” He is also seen as his own man—a follower of Francis “but not a photocopy,” according to Cardinal Robert McElroy—moderate in temperament and in his approach to contested ideological and doctrinal questions.
Speculation, often accompanied by projection, runs rampant in the opening days of a papacy. Leo will no doubt confound the hopes of some and defy the expectations of others. Conservative and progressive Catholics alike are bound to experience vindication—and disappointment. Which is just as it should be: the pope is the leader of all Catholics. It is therefore worth underscoring what the new one declared in his first homily: “God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles, and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator for the sake of the entire mystical Body of the Church.”
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