As a Jesuit, I felt sure 12 years ago that there was no real chance the cardinals would elect a Jesuit pope. As an American, I felt sure six days ago that there was no real chance they would elect someone from the United States.
Today, I am overjoyed at having a terrible track record for predicting the outcome of papal conclaves.
Now that the initial surprise and celebration have passed, how will American Catholics respond to Leo XIV, the first American pope and the successor to Francis, my fellow Jesuit, when they get to know him better? From what we can tell so far, those on both the left and the right of the U.S. political divide are likely to be frustrated. Leo could well end up being the pope who makes it clear that the reason Catholic doctrine does not fit well into American politics is because it makes heavier demands than partisans on either side are willing to bear.
Even though he is a Chicago native and a White Sox fan known to many of his friends as Bob, Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was considered “the least American of the Americans” in the College of Cardinals, according to the Italian media. He has deep global experience, first in Peru as a missionary, teacher and bishop, then in Rome as the worldwide leader of his Augustinian order, and finally at the Vatican’s office for bishops, a post that was crucial for overcoming any skepticism among the electors about a candidate born in the United States.
But no matter how much he belonged to the global church, Leo appears to have kept an eye on issues back home. In February, a social media account under his name shared a post concerning Pope Francis’ open letter to the U.S. bishops about the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, including a column I wrote in which I argued that Francis’ letter posed the question to American Catholics of “whether we judge our politics according to the Gospel or the other way around.”
Already, many commentators are trying to classify his positions — on immigration, abortion, gun control, racism and L.G.B.T.Q. issues, among others — as conservative or liberal. Mapping a pope’s thinking onto the contemporary left-right political binary is doomed to fail, especially for a pope who has taken the name Leo XIV. The name connects him to Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching with his 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum.”
