The news earlier this month that Pope Leo XIV will not visit the U.S. in 2026 dashed hopes, especially strong among American Catholics, that the first U.S.-born Pope might participate in this year’s 250th anniversary celebrations of the nation’s founding.
No reasons were given in the Vatican spokesman’s terse statement, but the Pope’s international travel schedule was already pretty full, with expected visits to Africa in April, Spain during the summer and Peru in late fall. It makes sense that Leo would put a priority on ministry to more obviously needy countries in the developing world, particularly Peru, where he long served as a missionary and bishop. Ironically, there is talk that the South America trip might also feature a stop in the last pope’s native land of Argentina, where Francis never went during his 12-year reign.
Leo’s absence from the U.S. during the semiquincentennial year will be especially conspicuous since, as was announced last week, he plans to spend Independence Day, the capstone date of America’s 250th, on the southern Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. The visit is bound to draw lots of attention in the U.S. because of its relevance to a polarizing national fight in which the pope has taken a vocal part.
The island has become a symbol of Europe’s migration crisis because thousands of would-be immigrants to Europe land there each year — tens of thousands of them in peak years. In 2013, Pope Francis took his first official trip outside of Rome to Lampedusa, where he mourned migrants who had drowned at sea and issued a passionate call for the humane treatment of those seeking to enter Europe.
Migration, which Francis made a signature issue of his pontificate, became a major point of tension between the Vatican and President Donald Trump, even before the latter’s first election. Answering a question about then-candidate Trump’s plans for a border wall and mass deportations, Francis told reporters in February 2016 that, “if a man says these things, he is not Christian.” Trump responded: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
In February 2025, less than three months before his death, Francis wrote in an open letter to the U.S. bishops that “the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”
Words have not been quite so heated under Leo, but the current Pope praised the U.S. bishops’ November 2025 pastoral letter on migration, which opposed mass deportation. Leo told reporters the same month that “when people have lived good lives — many of them for 10, 15, 20 years — treating them in a way that is, to say the least, extremely disrespectful, and with instances of violence, is troubling.”
The July 4 morning visit to Lampedusa was announced as part of a slate of spring and summer trips within Italy, and the Vatican spokesman did not respond to a question as to whether the scheduling was meant to send a message. Some have tried to account for the date by noting that it falls near the 13th anniversary of Francis’ visit to the island on July 8.
Whatever the backstory, the optics in the United States will be hard to miss. As Americans wake up to celebrate their foremost national holiday in a historic milestone year, amid a heated national debate over migration, one of the first news reports they see will be the words and images of their compatriot Pope defending the human rights of migrants.
English Addresses
Leo has been experimenting with his communications policy in ways that reflect his U.S. origins, most obviously in his gradually increasing use of his native tongue. He delivered his rich and lengthy annual address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See last month almost entirely in English, a break from his predecessors, who read it in Italian or French.
Another reflection of the Pope’s mother tongue was his warning in the same speech that “a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.”
Versions of “Orwellian” exist in other languages too, often formed from Orwell’s name, but the reference comes most readily in English. One wonders what Orwell himself, no friend of popes, would have made of the Pope’s words. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell offered as an example of dishonest and deceptive language this sentence: “The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution.” But perhaps the last 80 years, including the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, and St. John Paul II’s role in the fall of Soviet Communism would have modified his opinion.
Leo, who is in many ways much more formal than his immediate predecessor, has displayed an American informality in holding brief media scrums after visits to the papal country residence of Castel Gandolfo. He’s made some of his most newsworthy statements on these occasions, including in response to EWTN reporters (here and here). But there have been criticisms, even in these pages, of the Pope’s decision to meet the press in this way — and perhaps he has taken heed. The last time he stopped to speak to the journalists outside Castel Gandolfo was Dec. 23.
The opportunities to ask the pope a question have vastly increased during the last two pontificates, especially under Francis, who granted more than 200 interviews, more than 70 of book length, in addition to 40-plus in-flight press conferences. But in another way, journalists’ access to the pope has diminished in the same period, notably with the demise of reporting pools during his meetings with heads of state and other dignitaries.
Press Pool Memories
Until the practice was ended during COVID, never to be revived, a few journalists were allowed to watch a visiting president or monarch process through a series of grand reception rooms in the Apostolic Palace up to the private library of the pope, observe the two leaders’ greeting and the beginning of their conversation, then come back at the end of their private talk to see their exchange of symbolic gifts.
It was a chance to monitor the pope and his entourage up close, sometimes confirming or dispelling more distant impressions. On a visit to the library early in Francis’ pontificate, it became clear to me how much more freewheeling the new regime was going to be. At one point, I accidentally walked through the wrong door and practically bumped into a pair of prelates coming in to see Francis — something that never would have been allowed to happen under Benedict or, presumably, under the punctilious Leo.
But the most important part of the library pool experience, on a personal level, was that it gave a mere reporter a chance to greet the pope, with a photo to prove it. I distinctly remember my first time, almost two decades ago, after a meeting between Benedict and the president of Madagascar. I could hardly believe that I had, though only for an instant, the attention of a man with unique responsibility for the souls of a billion Catholics and whose field of concern encompassed the entire world. I’ve had the privilege of similar moments a number of times over in the succeeding years — but, no, it never gets old.
