In retrospect, Pope Leo XIV had it all going for him.
The new pope, whose election on the second day of the conclave stunned the Roman Catholic world, seemed to be from two places at once. He was born and educated in the United States, a country vital to the church’s finances. But he was also a missionary, pastor and bishop in Peru who ran the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, a part of the world where the church is vibrant.
He had the good papal housekeeping seal of approval from Pope Francis, his predecessor, who put him in one of the top jobs in the Roman Catholic Church. There, as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, he led the office that helped that pope choose bishops and, thus, determine the future of the church.
He knew, and was one of, the voting cardinals in the church’s powerful bureaucracy, but he put liberals at ease with his strong support for Francis’ arguably greatest change, which sought to make the church’s decision-making process more bottom-up and closer to the faithful.
In uncertain times, he ran a global religious group, the Order of St. Augustine, that required a sophisticated understanding of the world. His deep theological formation may have put conservatives worried about doctrine at ease. At age 69, the new pope is the ideal age for a papal candidate.
The major strike against him was his American nationality, a deal breaker in decades past because it was seen as being too closely aligned with the world’s dominant super power. But in a world order that has changed significantly and in a church that increasingly sees beyond nationality, that apparently turned out not to matter to the 133 cardinals voting in the Sistine Chapel.
“He checked all the boxes,” said John Allen, a veteran Vatican analyst and author of the book “Conclave.” He added, “Geography and nationality stopped being a voting issue.”
After a dozen years of Francis’ shaking up the church, the College of Cardinals apparently wanted to keep moving in Francis’ direction but with fewer detours and crashes. They chose a mild-mannered pastor, moderate in tone but resolute in his defense of doctrine, one with deep Roman experience and governing chops.
“We must seek together how to be a missionary church,” Pope Leo said in Italian from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in his maiden address Thursday as the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics. He said the church needed to work together “to build bridges and to keep our arms open, like this very piazza, welcoming.”
Only hours after his election, it was impossible to know how Leo would govern. But his first words, and the name he took, gave some clues. The Vatican said his name echoed the previous Leo, a pope in the late 1800s who helped establish the church’s Catholic social justice tradition. He also name-checked Francis, saying, “Thank you, Pope Francis!” and prompting an outburst of applause from the crowd below.
He said the word “synodality,” which means little or nothing to secular ears but which inside the church spoke volumes about his intention to carry out Francis’ vision for a church that rules less from on high in Rome than by consulting its faithful, bringing bishops and lay people, including women, together to make the big decisions.
And he spoke about peace and being close to those who suffered, reflecting his pastoral sense, but also reverted to Vatican tradition by appearing on the balcony in a vestment that Francis had shed.
While the Americans in the crowd rejoiced at the naming of one of their own — “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” some chanted — and received congratulations from the Italians who seemed bewildered by the unfamiliar face on the balcony, supporters of Francis expressed a sigh of relief.
The front-runner to succeed Francis had been the church’s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, who, while an experienced diplomat with a distinguished career in the church, did not have pastoral experience. In the weeks and days leading up to the conclave, critics of Parolin, including Italian cardinals, spoke admiringly of other candidates, including Prevost, suggesting that Parolin’s support was softer than expected.
But when the white smoke billowed from the chimney over the Sistine Chapel on the second day of voting, many liberals worried that it meant the voters had coalesced around Parolin, a bureaucrat they feared would suck out all the fresh air Francis had breathed into the church.
Parolin did emerge on the balcony, but still cloaked in cardinal red. He smiled easily, a background figure to a new pope who liberals believed would protect Francis’ legacy.
In October, Prevost sounded much like Francis when he told Vatican News that a “bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom, but rather called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them and to suffer with them.”
Vatican analysts expect Leo to clearly stick up for migrants, the poor and those exploited by great powers, though perhaps less provocatively than Francis did. He is viewed as pastoral, and so open to listening to the concerns of a wide variety of Catholics. But, at least for now, he is seen as less than likely to make changes to church teaching on issues like the ordination of women as deacons, birth control and the status of gay men in the church.
Alberto Melloni, a church historian, said that while Leo was clearly in Francis’ mold on his vision of a church moving closer to the people and being governed more from the bottom-up, on hot-button social issues, “he kept his hands free.”
But as Francis showed, people change when they become pope: He was considered a conservative cardinal in native Argentina.
In a 2023 interview with Catholic News Service, Leo, then a cardinal, stressed that clerics respond to problems in their parishes by reflecting on their oath to “live and work in communion with the Holy Father.”
That is now him.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
