Initial Impressions on a Papal First| National Catholic Register
For the third straight time, the cardinals chose a new pope on the conclave’s second day, and they delivered a significant first.
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost is now Pope Leo XIV, the first American and Peruvian national to occupy the See of Peter.
There is no usual path to becoming an American pope, but there is one to becoming an American cardinal. Cardinal Prevost did not take it.
Born in 1955, he grew up in Dolton, Illinois, bordering Chicago’s South Side. Attending his local St. Mary of the Assumption parish and school, he went to the high school seminary of the Augustinians in Holland, Michigan, leaving home at age 14. Pope Leo thus belongs to the last generation for which that would have been usual (that high school seminary closed in 1977). Joining the Order of St. Augustine (OSA), he took his undergraduate studies at Villanova in Philadelphia and graduate degrees at the Angelicum in Rome.
His dominant pastoral experience was as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru. Elected twice as head of the Augustinian order worldwide, he served two six-year terms, from 2001-2013. Pope Francis, early in his pontificate, made him bishop of Chiclayo in Peru in 2014, where he remained until January 2023, when he was brought to Rome as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, one of the most senior curial departments. Created a cardinal in September 2023, he was elected pope less than 22 months later.
Initial Impressions
There are only impressions, not conclusive analysis, at the beginning. And who the new pope will be is not exactly who he has been. Being Leo is different than being Robert, just as being Peter is different than being Simon. There is no shortage of popes who proved to be quite different than what was expected — not least Pope Francis. For example, he rarely gave interviews when archbishop of Buenos Aires; as pope he gave more than three hundred, dozens of them book-length.
That may — may — end, as Leo XIV was quiet these last two years in Rome, not commenting widely. His manner is confident, pleasant and reserved. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera employed the headline “Un Papa Calmo” — a calm, serene pope. It may be that the cardinals desired a somewhat quieter pontificate after the voluble Francis.
Papal Ceremonial Appears To Be Back
Pope Leo XIV appeared on the loggia of St. Peter’s on Thursday evening, and celebrated Mass in the Sistine Chapel on Friday morning in a wholly unremarkable manner, wearing what popes are supposed to wear and doing what popes are supposed to do. That is part of being Peter rather than Simon, Leo rather than Robert; very often over the last 12 years, Jorge competed with Francis for prominence.
Leo’s initial homily in the Sistine Chapel — drafted ahead of time by Vatican officials, but subject to his revisions — drew upon scripture, Vatican II and St. Ignatius of Antioch, suitable for an Augustinian, who are students of the patristic period. Curial officials will have to adjust if, when the new pope mentions Ignatius, he means the early martyr and not the 16th-century Jesuit founder.
He spoke extemporaneously in English at the beginning of his homily, as he spoke in Spanish on the loggia the previous evening. A pope who speaks regularly in Italian, the language of Rome, Spanish, the plurality language amongst Catholics, and English, the global language, will have a great advantage.
And Leo may have the best papal singing voice since the early years of St. John Paul the Great.
The Lion for the 14th Time
The first decision a new pope makes after accepting his election is his choice of regnal name; Leo means “lion” in Latin and Italian.
This choice of names is a moment of intense spiritual pressure with little time to reflect, therefore godly names such as Benedict, Innocent, Pius and Clement are so common. The two patristic popes called “the Great” are Leo (440-461) and Gregory (590-601), which is why there have been so many of them.
Leo XIV has yet to explain why he chose that name, so we speculate. It is notable that after recent popes who were innovative in their names (both John Pauls and Francis), Cardinal Prevost chose a more traditional name.
My initial reaction was that the two relevant precedents were the first, Leo the Great, and the last, Leo XIII (1878-1903). Peggy Noonan wrote, following the same line, “The two big Leos were Leo the Great and Leo XIII.”
While those precedents are the likely ones, we don’t know that certainly yet. There have been other Leos who are most certainly not the reason for Cardinal Prevost’s choice.
Leo X (1513-1521) reigned when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door in 1517, in part due to Leo’s practice of selling indulgences. The next pope of that name, Leo XI, died after only 27 days in office, a reign shorter in 1605 than that of Blessed John Paul I in 1978. Leo XII (1823-1829) ruled after Napoleon had disrupted the European order and harassed the papacy; Leo XII took a reactionary line not proposed as a model today.
Pope Leo XIII
Leo XIII came to the papacy at age 68 and reigned until 93, the oldest man ever to hold the office, and the fourth longest-serving pope ever, after St. Peter, Blessed Pius IX, his own predecessor, and John Paul II.
As the father of modern Catholic social teaching, Leo XIII was immediately invoked upon the election of Leo XIV as a champion of the poor, of workers, even of redistributive economics. Leo XIII was far more complex than that. His signal achievement was to recognize that the world of Tridentine Catholicism, suspicious and even hostile to modernity, needed to move toward to engagement in the spheres of culture, politics and economics. He was brilliant, innovative and liberal — but not as those terms are used today. His analysis of modernity was balanced and careful, avoiding extremes while insisting on space for the Gospel.
While there will be much written about Leo XIII — already a benefit of the new pontificate! — a few initial points are noteworthy today. Before Leo wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891 — the great charter encyclical of Catholic social teaching — he wrote Libertas in 1888, defending freedom as the “greatest of all the natural endowments.”
He was a pope of liberty, and wrote Rerum Novarum precisely against those economic forces that were eroding, not expanding, the liberty of workers. He inveighed fiercely against communism before it had been implemented anywhere.
Leo XIII also wrote against “Americanism,” condemning tendencies in the United States to subordinate the faith to the local culture. That remains relevant today where — as Cardinal Prevost encountered in Peru — the question of inculturation remains alive.
Cardinal Francis George and An American Pope
With his election, Leo XIV instantly eclipsed all previous cardinals from Chicago. The greatest of those, Cardinal Francis George, had been in the thoughts of many lately, due to the tenth anniversary of his death last month, and the presence in Rome of his protégé, Bishop Robert Barron, offering media commentary these last days peppered with memories of his mentor.
A keen student of American culture and Church history, George told Barron that, “until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.” It is quite possible that the college of cardinals, drawn from every part of the globe, have concluded that such may be happening. That too, remains to be seen.
Cardinal George was tough on his fellow American Catholics, commenting that while baptized as Catholics, they had adopted a Protestant outlook. Whether the first American pope will follow his fellow Chicagoan in offering bracing assessments is not known, but never before has a pope known the United States from the inside.
Pope Leo XIV gave a hint of such analysis in his Sistine Chapel homily, addressing not the United States, but the global situation.
“Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure. These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied,” the new Holy Father preached.
“This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.”
In The Wall Street Journal, I wrote about Cardinal George, who twenty years ago, at the election of Pope Benedict XVI, stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s looking with historical eyes at imperial Rome, long in ruins. Yet the Church had just elected a successor of Peter, whom the Romans had put to death on the Vatican hill.
In 1586, Pope Sixtus V had moved one of those ruins, a 350-ton obelisk to the center of St. Peter’s Square, where it stands to this day. It would have been the last landmark which St. Peter looked upon from his crucifixion, and it is the first landmark a new pope sees upon his election.
On the top of that obelisk is a bronze cross, and placed therein is a relic of the True Cross. The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on Sept. 14th.
It is Pope Leo XIV’s birthday.
Peter looks upon the Cross in Rome again.
