We greet the election of the first American pope with surprise and hope. The 267th pope of the Catholic Church is a Chicago-born Augustinian, though he is, practically speaking, an adopted son of Peru where he has spent much of his life as a missionary priest and has dual citizenship.
He spoke in Italian and in Spanish when addressing his former diocese of Chiclayo. He is an accomplished canonist, deeply familiar with the church’s internal laws. He comes into the office facing serious challenges of finance and governance in Rome.
Because of his closeness to Pope Francis, it is easy to speculate that in choosing the name of Leo, our new Holy Father may be pointing to his predecessor Pope Leo XIII, who elaborated the church’s social teaching in encyclicals like Rerum Novarum. The last Pope Leo was also known for promoting Marian devotion, confronting modernist heresy, and, like Benedict XVI, promoting the compatibility of faith with human reason.
We expect Leo XIV will be a solid witness to the dignity of every life. He has tied together the issues of abortion and euthanasia frequently in his homilies: “God’s mercy calls us to protect every life, especially those society overlooks — the child yet to be born and the elderly nearing their journey’s end — because each bears Christ’s face.” We are needful of exactly this kind of bold leadership against the culture of death.
But we confess some apprehensions as well. Robert Francis Prevost has promoted Francis’s project of “synodality,” which risks dividing the church into different camps. He has recently made a special point to promote voices making spurious criticisms of Vice President JD Vance’s elaboration of “the order of love” in Catholic thinking. We are surprised the College of Cardinals chose a candidate who has been dogged by questions about his handling of priestly abuse cases. We hope that as the media pursue these stories to their end, his innocence and good judgment are revealed for the whole world.
The pontificate of Francis has been doctrinally, liturgically, and tonally disruptive. We hope Leo XIV brings peace within the church even as he calls for peace outside of it. Pope Francis often made scabrous criticisms of younger, more tradition-minded priests and faithful. With Leo XIV beginning his reign at the relatively spritely age of 69, it occasions a serious question: With a potential 20- or 30-year pontificate ahead of him, does Pope Leo XIV stiffly resist or gently accommodate the generational turnover and geographic shift that is turning the Catholic Church in a more traditional direction? We pray that even as he calls our consciences to love the poor, he does not scold those who, imitating Mary of Bethany, pour out expensive oil, honoring Jesus, our Savior, with the finest liturgical instruments at hand.