The American Pope, A Pope of the Americas
05/09/2025
Habemus Papam, and he is an American. The first reaction of many to the news that Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, had been elected pope was slightly hesitant. This is not just because of the old wisdom that an American would never be pope, or at least not so long as the United States was a world superpower, which has now been overturned. Though knowing the cardinal-electors were mostly Francis appointees, and so unlikely to support a candidate totally at odds with the message of his papacy, many couldn’t help but worry for a moment about an acquiescence from Rome to the current tenor of American political and religious life.
We do not know much about Pope Leo XIV yet, but what we do allays those concerns. The sixty-nine-year-old Chicago native is an Augustinian who spent many years of his life as part of the Augustinian mission in Peru. His papal name does not seem to recall the excesses of Leo X and his pet elephant, but rather the social teaching of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum. Indeed, Prevost arrived in Peru in the 1980s, in the decades following labor movements there, and worked amongst communities experiencing high unemployment and poverty. After a few years back in Chicago as pastor for vocations, he returned to Peru from 1988-1999 during the insurgency of the Shining Path, a communist party, and large-scale repression by the national armed forces, whose human rights abuses he vocally opposed. He later served as Bishop of Chiclayo, and as the National Registry of Identification and Civil Status for Peru posted on social media, “The pope is Peruvian!”—having received citizenship in 2015.
Pope Leo XIV might be the first American pope, but more importantly, he is a pope of the Americas—a pope who knows what it is to be a migrant, a citizen of more than one country, a person who builds bridges between languages and cultures. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that he thanked Pope Francis while speaking of dialogue and encounter in his initial “Urbi et Orbi” address and has previously spoken of his experience of the synod as highlighting that a bishop “is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom,” but is called to walk with and suffer with his people.
The pope to follow Francis was always going to be faced with a difficult task. Francis was charismatic, and as Paul Lakeland noted on this platform, remarkably human in a way that resonated with people far beyond the Church. Initial indications suggest that Pope Leo shares Francis’ desire for synodality, pastoral sensitivity and an emphasis on the Church’s social teaching, though he is perhaps more conservative on questions of gender and sexuality (this being mostly a pastoral question since Francis made no doctrinal changes on these issues either). But the new pope cannot cosplay as Francis, he must make his own way in the papacy. As an American and Peruvian pope, Leo XIV has an opportunity to present a face of the American Catholic Church that counters the politics of fear, nationalism and ever-more restricted borders. Ironically, the fear of the past, that American Catholics might be more loyal to Rome than to the nation, might serve us well in this moment, if we can look beyond the borders not only towards Rome but out, into the world we are called to love.
For more papal media resources, visit www.sacredheart.edu/pope.
Postscript
Leo’s election has been received as a clear blow to those most unsympathetic to Francis. As E.J. Dionne put it in The Washington Post, Leo’s election signified that there is “no going back” from Francis, and this is a bitter pill to swallow for many American Catholics. Steve Bannon described the outcome as a worst-case scenario for MAGA Catholics, referring to him as the “Worst Pick Ever.” It seems unlikely that Bishop Robert Barron, Timothy Busch and other Americans who were stumping for a quiet papacy (or directly for Cardinal Péter Erdő) are happy with this choice, although Barron at least has put on a publicly positive face. Indeed, it is likely no coincidence that accusations of mishandling sexual abuse cases in Peru and the United States came to light in part through reporting from a website associated with the anti-Francis right in the United States. These accusations need to be reckoned with, although highlighting them without similarly pointing to Erdő’s (which had been noted by the Survivors Network for those Accused by Priests) indicates a weaponization of others’ suffering to advance a political agenda.
The election of a Pope from Chicago highlights the richness of Catholicism in the Midwest, a culture unto itself that sometimes gets short shrift in the American imagination compared to the Northeastern variety in places like Boston and New York. The rich ethnic tapestry of Chicago Catholicism—Black, German, Irish, Polish, Italian, Czech, Mexican—has produced some of the most interesting American Catholic literature (such as the novels of John R. Powers and James T. Farrell), liturgical music (GIA Publications and World Library Publications, now merged, are both located there) and kitsch (World’s Finest Chocolate, the oxymoronically named parochial school fundraising company, is also headquartered there). This author was nearly brought to tears imagining how priest, sociologist and romance novelist Fr. Andrew Greeley—lover of Chicago and Catholicism in equal measure—would have received this news. There was a certain poetry in Leo being elected during the very time when the funeral of David Tracy, University of Chicago theologian who occupied the endowed chair donated from Greeley’s literary revenues, was taking place.
The Midwest, in part on the strength of its German culture, has also historically been a hotbed of progressive Catholicism, particularly in its reception of Catholic social teaching. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that a new Pope Leo should come from that land of railroads, refineries and factories, now reduced in many places to the “rust belt” with its accompanying resentments that have helped fuel Trump’s rise. As we watch and resist the horrors to which such resentment and nostalgia can lead, perhaps we can take to heart Leo’s exhortation, “God loves us, God loves you all and evil will not prevail!”
From the editors—
Daniel A. Rober is a systematic theologian and chair of the Department of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University.
Callie Tabor is an assistant professor in the Department of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University.