In the end, after all the fevered speculation, the favourites were found wanting. It was not to be Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican’s top diplomat, nor Cardinal Tagle, “the Asian Francis”. No, the name that was announced from the balcony was little known: that of Robert Francis Prevost, an American from Chicago. The compromise candidate had been chosen.
His nationality is two things at once: not important, but crucial. In recent times, the Vatican has turned to America in financial desperation, no longer able to rely on funding from the German-speaking lands, now that increasing numbers there avoid paying the Church tax. The Americans have obliged. But it has not been a happy relationship. The American Church has bankrolled the Vatican, while the Italians and their allies have continued to use the cash in ways that are hardly transparent. American patience has run out. The election of an American Pope means that from now on, at long last, the Italian way of doing things in the financial sphere, that has led to innumerable scandals, is over. Expect no more stories of the type that involved Italian bankers swinging from under Blackfriars Bridge; rather expect the intervention of corporate America, backed by an American Pope. If this works, and the Italians have ways of fighting back, it will be a new era. And, relatively young in Papal terms, the 69-year-old Leo XIV has perhaps 20 years ahead of him in which to bring this about.
He is American, and yet he is not American: he has a Peruvian passport, and has worked in that country for decades as a missionary. He is in no way aligned to the MAGA Catholicism of JD Vance. Far from it, as their recent spat on X revealed. Leo XIV is pro-immigration, speaks of bridges not walls, and is all the things that Trump isn’t and Pope Francis was. As he spoke from the balcony he spoke good Italian, and he also spoke in Spanish, mentioning his former diocese in Peru. He is American, but he is firmly rooting himself in the Latin American experience. It has often been said that there could never be a Pope from the world’s only superpower. Well, there is now, and Leo XIV shows how it is done: an American by birth, but one with a very international outlook. In the eyes of MAGA Catholics, he will seem a terrible political Lefty, but in the eyes of most Catholics, of which there are 1.4 billion around the world, this won’t matter. Most of them live in grim circumstances and in challenging countries and are deeply attached to those who speak of the Church’s love for the poor. Mother Teresa of Calcutta remains the most important Catholic of the age. Various photographs have emerged of Leo, as a diocesan bishop in Peru, wading through flood zones in Wellington boots, riding a horse in a country with no roads, and helping out in a soup kitchen. He has actually lived with and worked with the economically disadvantaged: that marks him out, when you think of some of the very grand prince bishops of the Church in the USA, as distinctly un-American. But it is pure Catholic gold.
“Expect no more stories of the type that involved Italian bankers swinging from under Blackfriars Bridge.”
He was a missionary, and at the same time he has been an administrator; here too, he spans two worlds. As Prior General of the Augustinian Order for two six-year terms, he travelled the world, and ruled a disparate body of men, and no doubt had some tough decisions to make. His most recent job in the Vatican was presiding over the dicastery that appoints, and in some cases disciplines, bishops. In his two years in post, he won respect for the way he did his job. The Vatican machine, the Roman Curia, is widely seen as not fit for purpose, and in need of leadership and reform. Leo XIV, the cardinals must be hoping, is the man to deliver reform.
In his opening speech he name-checked Pope Francis twice. He will not undo his legacy, whatever that legacy was, which is still hard to discern. Leo will continue with the synods on synodality (conferences about having conferences, as they have been called). But he might take the project in a somewhat different direction. Several cardinals, who are not noted conservatives, such as Vincent Nichols and Timothy Dolan, spoke before the Conclave about the need for greater doctrinal clarity and here Leo may well deliver. He name-checked Saint Augustine too, the great theologian and saint who, 1,500 years ago, laid down the parameters of the Church’s relations with the world — in it, but not of it. An Augustinian Pope means an intellectually grounded Pope, a Pope rooted in theological tradition and suspicious of innovation.
There were other signs as well in that opening speech. He gave a special greeting to the people of Rome, to huge cheers, for he is their bishop after all, and to the Italians. He was signalling his intention (John Paul II did it as well) to be a Roman and an Italian by adoption. Rome and Italy will appreciate that hugely. He is theirs, a source of immense pride; he showed he wanted to be theirs and he understood the importance of being theirs. And to underline the point, he mentioned the supplication to the Madonna of Pompei, a traditional prayer to be uttered at noon on that very day. To most, maybe all, people outside Italy, Catholics included, Pompei means ruins, but to Italians it is also an important shrine to Mary. And he concluded with the Hail Mary, the most popular prayer to the Madonna. A Leftist Pope? Sure, but a traditional Italian Pope as well, a Pope of two worlds.
He is the successor to Pope Francis, the great disruptor, the man who said hagan lio, “make a mess”. Those who were expecting someone to undo the Francis years, at least directly, were always doomed to disappointment: there were not enough votes for that in the Conclave, and besides, it’s awkward trying to explain away the last 12 years as a blip or a mistake in a Church that values consistency of doctrine. But at the same time, there were clear indications that a more orderly way of doing things has returned. He wore the traditional garb of a newly elected Pope, the Apostolic stole and the scarlet mozzetta. Francis refused the latter, saying, according to some, “The carnival is over”: or more likely “I prefer not”. But by donning the mozzetta, Leo indicated that he will be the sort of Pope traditionalists can love. He looks like a Pope — there is a bit of a resemblance to the bespectacled Paul VI — he smiles, he is confident but diffident, and he seems to understand that peace and unity are his mission. The relief, for traditionalist Catholics, is palpable, and came with the first sight of that mozzetta. Never has a piece of silk counted for so much.
How political a Pope will he be? He is worried about climate change and the plight of immigrants, as well as the conflicts around the world; so was Pope Francis, but Pope Leo may handle these themes with more subtlety, with more guarded interventions. One thing already apparent, from the first speech, and the sermon the next day in the Sistine Chapel, is that he does not want to be a nakedly political Pope. The peace he mentioned on the balcony was the peace of the Lord, the peace that comes from faith in God. In the Sistine Chapel he spoke about Jesus Christ and the need for faith, to offset “the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society”. He continued: “Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptised Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.” These words have political implications, but what is apparent is the bridge he is trying to build between faith and life, the project of Saint Augustine. He may be a political Pope, but he will be so for religious reasons, and religion will not be obscured by politics.
It is too early to tell what will happen, but the indications are good. He is eirenic, even soothing, perhaps a little boring as well; after the excitement of Pope Francis, this is to be welcomed. “Leone! Leone! Leone!” chanted the excited crowd when they heard the name he had given himself. Were they all thinking of the great Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903 after a term of 24 years and who was also elected at a similar age? Or were they thinking of Leo the Great, who saved Rome from Attila the Hun? The more recent Leo steered the Church towards reconciliation with the modern world, and wrote the encyclical De Rerum Novarum (“Concerning New Things”) which dealt with social questions, among them industrialisation, poverty and trade unions. Leo XIII led the Church into the modern world, while not forgetting the world from which it came. May Leo XIV, the Pope of two worlds, do the same.
