What to Make of the New American Pope

Francis’s legacy (and the Vatican’s financial troubles) factored into the College of Cardinals’ decision

According to insiders who spoke with the Washington Post, Leo was favored among cardinals from abroad:

Even before the conclave began, Prevost was viewed by many in the Vatican as a logical successor to Francis despite being from the United States — a nation the Holy See had long seen as having outsize global power and influence. Francis had plucked him from his distant outpost in Peru in 2023 to run the influential dicastery, or ministry, of bishops. In no time, he’d become indispensable to the pope’s bid to change the church by elevating clerics seen as more in line with Francis’s pastoral approach, emphasis on the poor and open door. …

“Robert Prevost was a missionary bishop who gave himself fully to his people and who played an important role in the church of his new country, Peru. In fact, he became a Peruvian citizen,” Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, who studied in Chicago, said in an interview Friday.

The support of cardinals from the Global South “must have played a key part in providing Prevost’s wide consensus,” said longtime Vatican watcher Marco Politi. “This conclave saw … the rise of a moderate church, seeking a balance, unity, harmony, a well-oiled curia, a collegial pope,” he added, referring to the Vatican bureaucracy.

As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, the Vatican is facing some pretty complicated problems regarding its finances. The Post’s sources said Leo was viewed as a good candidate to address that:

The Vatican is in financial crisis, suffering from a drop in global donations and a gaping deficit in its pension fund. The shortfalls had led Francis to clash with the heads of Holy See dicasteries over budget cuts shortly before his February hospitalization with double pneumonia, according to two Vatican officials familiar with the situation.

Two cardinals who spoke with The Post on Friday said that Leo, when he served as head of the bishop’s dicastery, and earlier, as the head of his Augustinian order, was seen as a sharp manager — the kind of detail man the Vatican needs.

Leo XIV has already doubled down on following in Francis’s footsteps

On Saturday, the new pope gave his first big speech to Roman Catholic cardinals and made it clear that he would continue to follow Francis’s lead. Per the New York Times:

[He] said he would continue the work of Pope Francis in steering the church in a more missionary direction, with greater cooperation among church leaders and a closeness to the marginalized.

Leo said he was committed to following a path of modernization and cited a major document that Francis issued in 2013. From that document, Leo highlighted multiple objectives, including “growth in collegiality,” “popular piety,” a “loving care for the least and the rejected,” and “courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world.”

“Francis masterfully and concretely set it forth,” Leo said, referring to the document, called “Evangelii Gaudium.”

Is the election of Leo a rebuke of Francis’s critics?

At the National Catholic Register, Michael Sean Winters highlights how Francis’s conservative critics lost:

The wealthy and well-organized conservative critics of Francis will be disappointed. Good. The new pope is not someone who will be seduced by their financial power. U.S. conservatives who disagreed with Francis would often cite the parochialism of his Argentine background and, especially, what they considered his Peronist streak. They said he misunderstood the U.S. That dog will no longer hunt.

In the pre-conclave chatter, there was concern that Prevost lacked the charisma of Francis. But you have a hard time finding a photo of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio smiling when he was archbishop in Buenos Aires. He was transformed by his election. In 2005, after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected as Pope Benedict XVI, a bishop told me, “Remember, Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope Benedict are different realities.” Sure enough, we soon saw photos of Benedict kissing babies. The previous 25 years, he had a desk job.

Who knows how Pope Leo XIV will play on the world stage. For now we can only state, but state with certainty, that the cardinals have chosen someone committed to the reforms Pope Francis began. The new pope will chart his own path, to be sure, but we know the direction in which he is headed.

The danger of projecting politics onto the Catholic Church

There has been a bit of a MAGA freakout about Leo XIV, on account of his pre-papacy pushback on J.D. Vance’s xenophobia and other things the new pope has said or shared on social media. Vance hasn’t taken the bait (yet), but right-wing influencers like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer and others definitely have — alleging that Leo is “woke” or worse. On the other side, some liberals have been quick to celebrate the new pope and claim him as one of their own. At the Nation, Jeet Heer warns against reducing Catholic politics to a simple modern binary:

The Catholic Church is nearly 2,000 years old, while the left/right spectrum only dates to the French Revolution, a little over 200 years ago. The accretion of church teaching over the centuries—not to mention the historically remote context of such ancient texts as the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, and the writings of the early church—make the church simultaneously very conservative and very radical. Both Francis and Leo XIV, simply by being mainstream Catholic clerics, have views that are well outside the norms of American public opinion on a host of issues that don’t easily map on to the left/right spectrum: Francis, although often loosely described as a “progressive” pope, opposed reproductive freedom and gay rights (even as he called for respect for gay persons). But Francis also called for a level of economic fairness, openness to migrants, and environmental concern that would make him far more radical than almost any elected official in America or many other nations. …

What’s politically significant is that right-wingers such as Vance have tried to co-opt the church along partisan lines. This attempt to create a right-wing church itself makes Leo XIV a natural opposition figure for Vance and other ideologues. Leo XIV might lend moral support to the political right on social issues, but he will also be a foe on matters of the economy, migration, and war. The choice by the College of Cardinals of the first American pope as someone with a record of opposing xenophobia might in fact have a conscious political dimension: It’s a rebuff of the attempt by figures like Vance to pretend that they alone own the church—an institution that has a global reach and a diverse membership.

Heer says that Vance and others should embrace the complications:

A better path forward would be to acknowledge that few Catholics adhere to the church’s teaching on all issues. Those who pick and choose doctrine are sometimes dismissed as “cafeteria Catholic.” But in reality almost all lay Catholics (and perhaps more than a few clerical Catholics) are “cafeteria Catholics.” Revising [William F. Buckley’s contention that the Church was a mother, not a teacher], one could argue that for believers the church is both a mother and a teacher—but that no one ever fully listens to either their mother or their teacher. As for JD Vance, as a Catholic for only the last six years, he should realize that it is more appropriate for him to take the role of student rather than teacher. Before Vance gets into another fight with the pope, he should definitely spend more time learning about the true depth and complexity of Catholic social thought.

Will Leo XIV provide a break from the Catholic culture war?

At the New York Times, Ross Douthat hopes that Leo XIV will be “a pope who tries to rise above the fray and give the church’s different factions breathing space, instead of threatening chaos or conflict with every appointment, every synod and every papal interview”:

That breathing space would be especially useful because the questions liberal and conservative Catholics have been fighting over since the 1960s, while enduringly important, may not be the territory that matters most to the Christian future.

For one thing, the Catholic culture war has been an argument about how to adapt to or resist a secular and liberal form of modernity that no longer seems particularly dominant. As Dan Hitchens put it in one of the best looks at the Francis pontificate, Catholicism today faces “an increasingly anarchic and multipolar international arena,” a crisis of confidence within the liberal order and a deep uncertainty about which forces actually represent the future. (An aging Europe and East Asia? A youthful, liberal Africa? Narendra Modi? Xi Jinping?)

Meanwhile, the religious order of the Western world is arguably post-Christian but not especially secular. As the sociologist Christian Smith wrote in a new book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete,” the decline of institutional religious faith has not given us the “secular city” envisioned in the 1960s. Instead, the rise of “supernatural, enchanted, magical, esoteric, occultic” ideas among the younger generation means that Christianity now confronts a strange postmodern version of the paganism it once overcame — a cultural situation in which its own supernatural claims are no longer a stumbling block but perhaps an essential selling point.

This is a much weirder landscape than the one in which liberal and conservative Catholics clashed over contraception or gay marriage, and it’s likely to get weirder still as we move deeper into a digital and virtual and artificial-intelligence-mediated existence. Catholicism has had little of note to say thus far about what it means to be Christian and human under these conditions or how Catholics should think morally and spiritually about their relationships to these technologies. But if Leo XIV reigns as long as Leo XIII did, no issue may be more important to the faithful — or the world. So a pope who preaches on the supernatural and teaches about the digital may well do much more for his church than a pope who returns yet again to the battles of the Catholic culture war.

Francis 1.5

At the Spectator, Ed Condon writes that Leo has to clean up his predecessor’s mess:

the most important unknown about the new pope isn’t what he will teach but how he will govern. Francis tended to live by his own admonition to ‘make a mess.’ 

Leo will have the less glamorous but fascinating job of deciding how to tidy it up, bringing a measure of coherence to often contradictory papal laws and teachings. How he chooses to do so, what he delicately rolls back and what he decidedly doubles down on, will shape the Church for decades to come – conceivably for the next century. 

All in, Pope Leo appears easily primed to be, if not Francis 2.0, at least Francis 1.5. After he is formally installed in the coming days, many Catholics will be looking to see if Leo intends to limit himself to debugging the system left by his predecessor, or aims to bring real upgrades to what has come before.

The last Pope Leo helped set the stage for America’s labor movement

At the Pillar, Seth Smith looks back on the impact Leo XIII had on the U.S. Church, from his skepticism about “Americanism” to how his teachings fueled the Catholic labor movement:

Perhaps Leo’s most enduring contribution to the Church in the United States and elsewhere was providing the foundation for modern Catholic social teaching, most famously expressed in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed the condition of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution.

Rerum Novarum rejected both unregulated capitalism and socialism. Leo affirmed the rights of workers to form labor unions, earn a just wage, and work in humane conditions. At the same time, he upheld the right to private property and warned against the dangers of class conflict and revolutionary ideologies. In doing so, he advocated for a role for the state in regulating the economy when absolutely necessary while cautioning against government overreach.

This encyclical had a profound impact on the American Church. At a time when American laborers – many of them Catholic immigrants – were working long hours for low pay in dangerous factories, Leo’s message offered moral support and legitimacy to the Catholic labor movement.

Catholic leaders in the United States began to speak more boldly on issues of social justice and the rights of workers, laying the foundation for future Catholic support for workers in the 20th century. This was seen, for example, in the work of Monsignor John Ryan, a Catholic University professor and member of the New Deal who used Leo’s concept of the “living wage” in Rerum Novarum as the basis for his work on the creation of a minimum wage.

Read the rest here.

How will Leo XIV handle AI and the new industrial revolution?

Pope Francis wasn’t shy about weighing in on artificial intelligence, and on Saturday, per Reuters, Leo XIV made it clear that the new technology was on his mind, too:

Leo XIV said the Church must now take the lead in facing newer threats to workers, such as artificial intelligence. He said AI posed “new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

At the National Catholic Reporter, Céire Kealty writes that the world’s workers need him on their side just like they needed his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, during the first industrial revolution:

Could I be so bold as to hope that Leo XIV might emulate his predecessor and promulgate his own encyclical on the current global labor landscape? It certainly is my hope.

The church has much to offer a world weary from the dehumanizing wiles of worker exploitation. Ours is a world where workers throughout the Global South endure terrible conditions to meet corporate quotas and satisfy consumer appetites for the newest phone or handbag or shirt. Ours is a world where corporations coolly sacrificed frontline workers in a global pandemic, shifting death, debility and other hardships onto the most vulnerable. Ours is a world where dreams of financial stability are an achievable reality for the few and just a dream for many. Ours is a world of “gigification,” where gig labor and contracted jobs abound as pension-guaranteed jobs disappear from sight. Ours is a world where governing bodies (like the current U.S. administration) invest billions into AI infrastructure while those technologies replace human workers, threaten jobs and entire industries, and more.

And, if I may echo the words of the late Pope Francis, ours is a world of globalized indifference, where we so easily shrug off the injuries endured by our neighbors so we can better cope with the injuries we’ve accumulated on our own journeys. We may feel materially richer this way, but we are made spiritually poorer in the process

Is Leo XIV proof that America is in “political decline”?

At the Bulwark, Jonathan Last warns against believing American politics played some role in the College of Cardinals’ thinking on the Conclave. But he also can’t resist responding to a pair of predictions about the likelihood of an American pontiff:

Earlier this week, Bishop Robert Barron explained to a reporter from CBS why the next pope wouldn’t be American: “Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.”

Barron is one of America’s MAGA priests, so naturally he could not imagine that anyone else in the world might view America as being in decline. But we are and it’s obvious. It’s obvious to the people of Canada, who just elected a prime minister exclusively on the grounds that the American century was over. It’s obvious to the Chinese, who are planning to step into the vacuum and establish their own world order. It’s obvious to our European allies, who are now making plans for a future in which America is toothless, lazy, and impotent. And maybe—just maybe—this reality was obvious the College of Cardinals, too.

Maybe they looked at America and realized that it was no longer a colossus bestriding the globe. No longer exceptional. Not just in decline, but deluded about its reality. Maybe Robert Prevost was elected pope because the Church realized they no longer needed to be concerned about America power.

American Catholicism is getting a close-up

As Francis X. Rocca points out at the Atlantic:

The new pope’s impact on the Catholic Church in America promises to be dramatic. Imagine the scenes in Chicago on his first pastoral trip to the country. Francis, who did little to hide his wariness of U.S. power and once said that it was an honor to be attacked by Americans, was nevertheless broadly popular with his flock there, as with the non-Catholic population. The U.S. is bound to embrace its native son with even greater fervor, not least because his elevation clearly confirms Catholicism’s status as an American religion, for any Catholics who might still harbor doubts about fully belonging in a traditionally Protestant society.

The conversation around the pope’s Creole roots

Genealogists quickly dug into Leo XIV’s ancestry and traced his maternal grandparents to a diverse Creole community in New Orleans, as the Washington Post reports:

At the turn of the 20th century, the pope’s maternal grandparents, Louise Baquie and Joseph Martinez, were living in New Orleans and listed as Black in the 1900 Census, with Martinez’s place of birth listed as “Hayti” and his occupation as “cigar maker,” according to census records. They lived in New Orleans’s 7th Ward, then the heartbeat of the city’s Creole community.

The couple eventually left the 7th Ward, according to the 1910 Census, in which they were listed as White. Martinez’s birthplace was listed as “Santo Domingo”— potentially referencing the Dominican Republic or the historical term “Saint-Domingue” for Haiti, according to Andre Kearns, founder and chief executive of Black Ancestries, a company that researches the ancestry of people of African descent.

In the 1920 Census, the family, then living in Chicago, was once again listed as White and Martinez’s birthplace was identified as Haiti. Leo’s mother, Mildred Martinez, was the couple’s only child to be born in Chicago; her siblings were all born in New Orleans.

The New York Times gives an overview of the Louisiana Creoles’ complex (and uniquely American) history:

Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié married at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. Until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1915, the church building was on Annette Street in the city’s Seventh Ward, a historic center of Afro-Creole culture.

Creoles, also known as “Creole people of color,” have a history almost as old as Louisiana. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent who were born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color.

Many Louisiana Creoles were known in the 18th and 19th centuries as “gens de couleur libres,” or free people of color. Many were well educated, French-speaking and Roman Catholic.

Over the decades, they established a foothold in business, the building trades and the arts, particularly music, with significant contributions to the development of jazz. They continue to be an important strand in the city’s famously heterogeneous culture.

The pope’s brother told the Times that his family doesn’t identify as Black and they didn’t discuss their Creole roots. Historians point out that many families of color, and particularly those who migrated from the South, left behind their mixed-race identities if they could pass for white. It’s not clear if that’s was also the Prevost family’s experience, but regardless, the new pope’s Creole ancestry has already become an inspiration to many in New Orleans and to Catholics of color around the world.

He’s also the first pope with a tweet history

The Verge’s Tina Nguyen’s reflects on a papal milestone (and her decision not to blast out a link to Leo XIV’s personal Facebook account) after “internet stalking” the pope in an attempt to glean his views in the hours after he was elected:

[T]there’s a strong argument to be made that mining any public figure’s digital activity is fair game, particularly if they’re political leaders held to some degree of accountability. Venmo requests are enough to tank congressmen’s careers. Old tweets can land someone in hot water in the present day. Finding a former Fox News anchor’s phone number linked to a public Google Reviews account can indicate a massive national security crisis.

The moment you try to apply that standard to the freaking pope, though, the logic just grinds to a halt — not because a world leader shouldn’t be held to this standard, but because it is utterly baffling that one can even mine the socials of the Vicar of Christ. In fact, it’s baffling to think that a religious figure could be subjected to scrutiny of their internet history, or that they possess something as anodyne as a digital footprint — particularly someone inheriting a role that supposedly dates back to the time of Jesus and was established by Saint Peter the Apostle, whose predecessors are ancient saints and medieval rulers, and who claims the title of God’s representative on Earth, according to the 1.4 billion members of the church he leads.

Maybe obsessing over the pope’s retweets is a uniquely secular, American way to assess an American pope — not through his leadership of the Order of Saint Augustine or his ministerial work in Peru, but through his voting record, sports loyalty, or whether he’s retweeted mean things about the President. (We are a very tribalist nation that only thinks about things through the lens of being American.) We are now collectively engaged in mining the metadata of Pope Leo XIV’s former life for clues as to the direction of his papacy just as much as we are trying to divine meaning from his choice of regnal name and the thirteen Leos that came before him. Frivolous or not, the digital history of a religious figure is now a thing that exists.

And yes, the new pope has seen Conclave

And he also plays Wordle, according to his older brother:

And yes, if you hadn’t heard, the pope is a White Sox fan

After Prevost became Leo, many people (on the internet) wondered which of Chicago’s two baseball teams he was loyal to, and somebody at Wrigley Field decided to claim him as a Cubs fan. But it didn’t take long to figure out that the native south-sider’s allegiances lay elsewhere:

Pope Leo XIV made the broadcast while at Game 1 of the 2005 World Series

pic.twitter.com/VGSqkRFsSB

— Joe Binder (@JoeBinder) May 9, 2025

Also, his brother confirmed in an interview that Leo XIV “was never, ever, a Cubs fan. So I don’t know where that came from. He was always a Sox fan,”