Pope Leo XIV’s first year as the Successor of Peter has brought a measure of internal calm and sobriety to the institutional Church following the turbulent years of Pope Francis. Yet the true nature of the first American pontiff largely remains elusive and his ultimate intentions for the Church are still difficult to read.
When he stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s on May 8 last year and greeted the world simply with ‘Peace be with you!’ Leo inherited a Church marked by long‑simmering internal disputes that had come out into the open and a style of governance in which papal authority was frequently exercised by personal fiat.
These included heated battles between doctrinal orthodoxy and heterodoxy laid bare by controversial documents such as Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans that revised settled teaching on morality and ministry. The disputes also involved papal decisions taken via motu proprio (decree) and ad hoc rescripts, often issued with scant consultation or reference to existing canonical procedures and institutions.
Over the past 12 months, Pope Leo has therefore tried to lower the temperature of these aspects of Francis’ rule, restoring some sense of normalcy to the papal office and re‑embedding governance in the Church’s legal and curial structures. His aim, he has often stressed, is to work for unity in a polarized Catholic Church and world.
Pope Leo’s first decisions were deliberate gestures of that restoration. He reinstated the use of papal vestments shelved by Francis and took up residence again in the Apostolic Palace, vacant since Benedict XVI. Though largely symbolic, they carried institutional weight, signaling a return to normality.
At the same time, Leo made clear from the outset that he wanted to reestablish order within a Curia that had grown uncertain of its own authority and riven by a decline in law and order, from arbitrary appointments and loose communications to lax financial controls and favoritism.
A canonist by training, many of his appointments, not only in the Curia but in dioceses around the world, have therefore deliberately favored accomplished experts in Church law. He appointed a well‑regarded Italian jurist, Archbishop Filippo Iannone, to succeed him as head of the Dicastery for Bishops — a significant choice that shifted the emphasis in episcopal selection from charisma to procedural integrity. More recently, he has appointed Australian Bishop Anthony Randazzo, another esteemed canonist, as the Vatican’s top legal officer.
Unresolved Cases
Still, justice within the Vatican remains blemished. The case of Father Marko Rupnik, the famed mosaic artist who was expelled from the Jesuits after being accused of serious sexual and psychological abuse over decades, has gone to trial. But two and a half years after it was announced that he could be tried, it is still unclear whether proceedings are underway. Similarly, the unresolved lawsuit of former Vatican auditor Libero Milone, dismissed by the Vatican in 2017 after he uncovered financial malpractice, continues to hang over the Curia as emblematic of questionable Vatican dealings. Leo XIV has so far not personally met Milone, despite requests.
Yet, financially, the new Pope has made cautious strides. His decree Coniuncta Cura (United Care) ended the Vatican Bank’s monopoly and encouraged limited cooperation with vetted external banks under an overarching ethical framework. He also closed a murky fundraising committee created during Pope Francis’ final illness. But the Holy See’s finances remain fragile, Cardinal Angelo Becciu’s case remains unresolved, and while Leo promises tighter oversight, some observers worry his measured style delays the kind of decisive action needed to rebuild confidence.
Regarding governance more generally, he has answered a cardinals’ request raised before the conclave for the Pope to consult them more often and to foster more collegiality to reduce factionalism. In January he convened an extraordinary consistory of cardinals in their first such meeting with the Pope, and although it was criticized for using the format of “synodality” which some critics say deliberately silences conservative voices, the meeting has gone some way to restoring the cardinals’ advisory role and reopening dialogue channels long closed under Francis. A second such meeting will take place at the end of June.
Further evidence of this willingness to consult has been seen in Leo’s individual meetings with cardinals marginalized during the Francis years — among them Cardinals Burke, Müller and Sarah. No cardinal who wishes to meet with him, he has said privately, will be denied an audience. Those who have interacted with him personally have described him as a pope who listens more than he speaks and who prefers to absorb multiple perspectives before acting. That patience is widely welcomed, though others warn it risks paralysis on divisive issues pertaining to doctrine and the liturgy. Again, he remains enigmatic, perhaps strategically so.
He has addressed some neuralgic, non-negotiable issues but with some caution and not without controversy. When he has spoken about abortion, he has deplored public funding of abortion, but has also framed it within a contentious broader “consistent ethic of life.” On the issue of homosexuality, he made a point of meeting with members of Courage International, an apostolate that supports men and women who experience same-sex attractions in living out the Catholic teaching on chastity. At the same time, he echoed Francis by playing down the issue of sexual sin in comments to reporters on the flight back from Equatorial Guinea, saying “justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion” are “greater and more important issues.”
Continuity with Pope Francis
When it comes to papal teaching generally, Leo has been lauded for making his teaching Christocentric. At the same time, he has shown fundamental continuity with his immediate predecessor. He has largely reaffirmed Francis’ teaching on marriage and family, praising Amoris Laetitia as a “luminous message of hope,” repeated many of Francis’ ecological and social themes, especially on migration, and has maintained support for synodality, but in a more disciplined form that reinforces episcopal authority.
He has so far resisted repealing the 2023 Vatican declaration Fiducia Supplicans allowing non‑liturgical blessings of same‑sex couples. The Vatican’s head of doctrine, Cardinal Victor Fernández, has insisted Pope Leo won’t touch it, although the Holy Father notably did not include it in a list of “key” documents from the Francis era, and in April he gave a narrower interpretation of the document, saying it blesses people individually, not same-sex couples or unions.
Despite his Marian devotion, he surprised and upset Mariologists and others by allowing Cardinal Fernández to publish Mater Populi Fidelis (The Mother of the Faithful People of God), a doctrinal note that diminished two historic titles for Our Lady. Whether he retains Cardinal Fernández as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is another impending and crucial papal decision.
In foreign relations, Leo was praised for his New Year’s address to ambassadors in which he delivered a blistering analysis of war being “back in vogue” and condemned the normalization of armed force as policy. His general yet forceful pronouncements gradually gave way, especially with the outbreak of the Iran war, to increasingly vociferous and unusually specific pleas for peace, eventually leading to a public clash with President Trump.
Leo has made his reservations about the Trump administration clear in his actions as well as words: he has appointed bishops who are critical of the administration’s policies, especially on the immigration issue, and has preferred to spend America’s upcoming 250th Independence Day not in his native U.S. but in Lampedusa, an Italian island symbolic of Europe’s migrant crisis.
In sum, his foreign interventions blend support for multilateral cooperation and human dignity with firm critiques of nationalism, war and ideological overreach in global institutions, including the United Nations.
Leo is the first pope to have such extensive missionary experience, and his moves to step up evangelization efforts — a key desire of cardinal electors ahead of the conclave — have been generally well received. His papal trips to the Middle East and Africa were widely seen as triumphs, as was his Jubilee of Youth gathering in Rome which drew more than 1 million young Catholics from 146 countries.
Major Writings
His first major document, the apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te (“I Have Loved You”) on love for the poor, reiterated much of Francis’s social teaching, most of it having been written during Francis’ pontificate. But Leo’s personal intellectual interest lies more in the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. In several addresses, he has called for international regulation and ethical limits relating to AI. Vatican sources say he is preparing a papal encyclical on the technology and human dignity, expected soon.
Leo’s communications are mostly cautious and curated. He grants few interviews, especially compared to his predecessor, but he has taken the unprecedented step for a pope of holding press gaggles — a novelty that has occasionally landed him in hot water as he has used them to wade into political battles, especially in the U.S. His public demeanor is courteous but restrained, his words few and measured. Those who have met the Pope describe him as someone who laughs easily but reveals little and whose silences and statements carry equal weight.
That cautious temperament is mirrored by his apparent reluctance to intervene decisively in internal, highly significant Church disputes. He has yet to seriously confront the German Synodal Way, including the German bishops’ recent decision to create a permanent “synodal conference,” earlier versions of which the Vatican opposed. Likewise unresolved is the potentially pivotal question of the Society of St. Pius X, preparing illicit episcopal consecrations this summer. So far, Leo has delegated the matter to Cardinal Fernández. Regarding ecumenism, he has warmly received the first female Anglican archbishop of Canterbury — who heads a communion separated from Rome — preferring dialogue and encounter to calls to conversion and an “ecumenism of return.”
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Leo has quietly allowed local exceptions to Traditionis Custodes, Francis’ 2021 decree restricting the Vetus Ordo, but he has avoided reopening the larger debate and has left alone some bishops accused of exceeding the decree. To some, this hands-off approach is prudent and aimed at lowering the temperature; to others, he is avoiding leadership on one of the Church’s most sensitive issues.
Those close to the Pope describe him as deeply prayerful, devoted to Mary, quietly humorous, and cautious by temperament. He distrusts grand gestures, preferring incremental reform to sweeping decrees. One year on, Pope Leo XIV has thus cultivated a reputation as the “quiet American pope,” methodically restoring decorum, legality and serenity to the papal office while at the same time, in some areas, pursuing the general line of Pope Francis.
A series of hard and pressing issues now crowd his doorstep, demanding clear and decisive leadership. How he confronts them in the months ahead will begin to dispel the enigma surrounding him, revealing more plainly who he is and where he intends to lead the Church.
