Leo XIV: What an American pope can teach America

Growing up, "the only white smoke young Robert Prevost ever saw" likely billowed from steelworks chimneys on Chicago's South Side, said Thomas Dyja in The Observer (U.K.). Last week, white smoke from the Vatican signaled that he'd been elected the first North American pope in the history of the Catholic Church. Adopting the name Leo XIV, the new pontiff addressed the crowds in St. Peter's Square first in Italian, then in Spanish, and concluded with a traditional blessing in Latin. But make no mistake, the new leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics is a "true son of Chicago." Known to friends as Bob, he's a White Sox fan from the "intimate and humane" city that gave the world Barack Obama, deep-dish pizza, and Playboy magazine. The cardinals' choice of an American has "stunned the Roman Catholic world," said Jason Horowitz in The New York Times. It breaks an "old taboo" against aligning papal authority with "the world's dominant superpower." But Prevost, a young but not too young 69, spent 20 years ministering to the poor in Peru, acquiring a Peruvian passport along the way, and the fact that he was born in a wealthy nation whose donors are "vital to the church's finances" may have ultimately worked in his favor.

The new pope is American, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. "But do not—for one second—think this is about us." Within minutes of Leo's election, MAGA keyboard warriors had surfaced a social media account bearing Prevost's name that had reposted articles criticizing the Trump administration's deportation policies and declared Vice President JD Vance "wrong" for interpreting Catholic doctrine as opposing foreign aid. To MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, that made Leo a "WOKE MARXIST POPE" presumably elected to give Trump a new nemesis. In reality, Leo's message of peace—he used his first Sunday blessing to call for cease-fires in Gaza and Ukraine—and compassion for the downtrodden just means he's a Catholic. We'll never know exactly why the cardinals picked him, but trust me that "no one in the Sistine Chapel was thinking about Trump."

Really? said Jill Filipovic in The Daily Beast. The Trump years have seen the rise of a "hard-right Catholic opposition" to the values of empathy and tolerance that Pope Francis preached. Liberals shouldn't kid themselves that any pope will hold progressive views on abortion, say, or gay marriage—and Leo's past statements suggest he's a traditional conservative on those issues. But the choice of an American pope committed to "decency" was likely meant as a corrective to the harsh new "Catholicism of Vance." Actually, said Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review, Leo has already walked back some of Francis' "modernist" reforms. They are "small things," but by speaking in "confident Latin" and choosing a traditional papal name, Leo has signaled to conservatives that he'll be "a major improvement" over progressive, emotive Francis.

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Leo "is neither MAGA nor woke," said David French in The New York Times. But the example of an American running an ancient church could inspire our brash young nation to widen its "frame of reference" and stop elevating "the temporal over the eternal." For Americans, the pope has always been "unreachable and other-worldly," said Mollie Wilson O'Reilly in MSNBC.com. Now he's one of us, able to speak to us directly, with "no need for a translator." Sooner or later Pope Leo from Chicago, "flat vowels and all," may choose to engage with us, his countrymen. The question is whether Americans are "prepared to listen."