Dr Massimo Faggioli
The 2025 conclave, which was quickly resolved on the second day, elected an American Augustinian to the papacy, Robert Francis Prevost, who chose Leo XIV as his name. In the days preceding the conclave, two other Americans had been seen in the Vatican, with different relationships with the Church, but both interested in including it in a nationalist political-religious plan. On April 20, the day before he died, there had been an audience between Pope Francis and Vice President JD Vance, a neo-Catholic and aspiring heir to the Trumpian movement. Then, on the day of Pope Francis’ funeral, the presence of President Donald Trump, always with his studied rudeness, but this time silenced by the architecture of the Vatican Basilica in the iconic moment of the one-on-one meeting with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The conclave indirectly responded to the two Americans in command of the United States, who took on the task of converting America to the God of ‘Make America Great Again’, by electing a Pan-American pope, born in Chicago, graduated from Villanova University in Philadelphia (where I have taught since 2016), and then a missionary in Peru for twenty years before arriving in the Vatican as prefect of the dicastery that has the task of helping the pope choose bishops for Catholic churches around the world. The conclave thought about much more, not just Trump and Vance. But the message launched by the cardinals resonates particularly in the United States, which is at the centre of the identity crisis of the ‘West’ with which the Church no longer identifies but from which it cannot detach itself. By electing Prevost, the conclave also sent a message to Europe in this moment of political soul-searching.
Leo XIV is a Pope of the Americas, in the plural. He is a global Catholic, born in a key city for multiculturalism in the USA like Chicago, a missionary in Latin America – he also has Peruvian citizenship. He worked in the Vatican helping Francis in the choice of new bishops, a crucial role. Most importantly, he is the first pope from the United States: a taboo has been broken. Few imagined it. It was difficult to imagine a pope from a world superpower, and it never happened in modern Church history. But, paradoxically, Trumpism has upset the global order and helped break this taboo.
American progressives will have to understand that their positions on gender and sexual morality do not exactly match those of the papacy and of many global Catholics”
Prevost is an Augustinian. Compared to the Jesuits, they are more disenchanted with modernity, the secular world and politics. It will be interesting to see how Leo XIV will frame various issues (one of the most sensitive today in reference to Augustine: just war doctrine). But clearly his thinking on Augustine is very different from that of JD Vance and many American illiberal or anti-liberal Catholics.
It is difficult to predict his path on divisive issues within the Church. Appointing women to leadership roles, as Francis has done, is the easiest thing. The difficult thing is to address the issue of the role of women in ministry and the diaconate in particular. Francis was opposed to this. We’ll see if Prevost continues to appoint women to leadership positions, or if he goes in a different direction. This is one area where there may be differences between popes—we may be surprised one way or another. On the issue of gender, LGBTQ, and sexuality, Prevost spoke undiplomatically years before he was elected Pope. But there is a difference between the way a prelate speaks and the way a Pope speaks. However, American progressives will have to understand that their positions on gender and sexual morality do not exactly match those of the papacy and of many global Catholics.
Challenges
Prevost embodies an idea of anti-nationalist Catholicism. This is something on which Catholicism has remained consistent for the last two centuries: there is a global Church that is allergic to nationalist projects, for theological and political reasons. Pope Francis had a natural inclination towards Asia. As a young Jesuit, he wanted to be a missionary in Japan. Francis’s most interesting trips have been to Asia and the Middle East. We’ll see what kind of world map Prevost will work on. Leo XIV will need strong support from the Curia. Pope Francis’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, will probably continue to be the head of Vatican diplomacy. We don’t know what it means to have a pope from the US who deals with Russia, Israel, the Arab world – or China, which is now the number one problem for the Americans.
He knows them well; they cannot accuse him of not knowing America or of being anti-American”
It’s also a new framework for his relations with the US. This will be a challenge for right-wing Trumpian Catholics in the US, but also, in a different way, for progressive Catholics who thought Francis agreed with them on everything. As an American, he can talk to American politicians and government in ways that were not possible for an Argentine Jesuit or the European popes who preceded Francis. He knows them well; they cannot accuse him of not knowing America or of being anti-American. It is more complicated to dismiss him as a ‘Marxist’ pope who doesn’t like America. The attempt, from characters like Steve Bannon, has already begun. But Trump and Vance have already understood that this election changes the scenario.
The most symbolically effective measure for ‘Make America Great Again’ in these first months has come from the Vatican and not from the White House. It is a very different idea of greatness. At the same time, with Leo XIV in the Vatican, US Catholicism will be subject to the temptation of a new ultramontanism – as they said in the nineteenth century, “no hope without the pope” – of commercialisation and trivialisation in favour of a misunderstood national pride that is never in short supply in the US.
