Pope Leo XIV, one year after the election: he is not the anti-Trump pope nor the restorer. It’s something harder to decipher
“Sometimes all of you give me great ideas because you think you can read my mind and my face, but you’re not always correct.” The joke, attributed to Leo XIV, with that almost Anglo-Saxon touch of irony (strange from an American) which Vatican experts still struggle to calibrateis worth more than a thousand body language analyses. Coming from a pontiff who comes from Chicago – from the South Side, to be precise, that neighborhood that does not forgive affectations – and who spent decades among the missionaries of Chiclayo, Peru, the joke sounds less like diplomacy and more like a clinical report.
But he’s not the problem. The problem is that the inherited categories – progressive or conservative, continuer or rupture, American or Roman – do not stand up to contact with Robert Prevost, and the commentators, as often happens when someone it cannot be cataloguedthey react with an industrial production of paradoxes.
The puzzle and who builds it
The image of the “Rorschach test” – everyone sees in the Pope what he carries within himself – was quickly put aside, and rightly so. But it is worth asking who had built that puzzle: not Prevost, but thecollective expectation of a pontificate decipherable according to the old codes. Leo XIV simply stopped fitting the grid. He reopened the Apostolic Palace, where the popes have lived for centuries, and no one shouted about counter-revolution. He granted the Latin mass to Cardinal Raymond Burke, champion of the hyper-conservative wing, after years of ostracism, and the silence was almost general. He returned institutional weight to the Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, archiving Bergoglio’s very personal, often excessively partisan style of government. And even progressives shrugged their shoulders.
The paradox is perfect: a pontiff who does “right-wing” things without the Catholic left rising up and “left-wing” things – the firmness on immigration and international law, the surreal clash with Trump – without the right calling him to the judgment of tradition. There are two cases: either he has everyone under control, or he has understood something that the others don’t.
Leo XIV, an atypical American
“I never thought of Prevost as an American citizen”confessed Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. The same Dolan that Trump had unexpectedly evoked as eligible for the papacy, as if the conclave were elected by a show of hands at Mar-a-Lago. Dolan’s phrase is revealing not of Prevost, but of ecclesiastical America: accustomed to thinking in terms of “cultural warriors” and the battle for the soul of the country, she finds herself with a compatriot on the throne of Peter who looks at the United States from Rome with that gaze – those who describe it write well – “perhaps not very decipherable, but increasingly papal”.
Leo XIV is American as are those who grew up in Chicago, loved the White Sox and pumpkin pies, and then he chose to become something else without denying anything about his roots. He is the son of the United States and “of the Americas” together: a distinction that is not geographical but of destiny. And the choice of Ronald Hicks as bishop of New York – almost unknown, alien to the culture wars that have weakened American Catholicism – says much more than any declaration of intent.
The “pax leoniana” and its challenges
After just a year, the balance sheets are premature. The challenges remain: mending a Church emerging from two decades of trauma – the resignation of Benedict XVI, the “revolutionary” papacy of Francis -, restoring order in Vatican institutions that had long been in tension, healing finances marked by years of imbalances and scandals. But the method is already recognizable. Cautious, not shy. Reformer, not restorer. The cancellation of the donation commission established by an already ill Francesco, the reorganization of the IOR, the return to the summer residence of Castel Gandolfo where every Tuesday, it is said, he goes to play tennis: these are all gestures that signal a very specific direction.
“The Curia is the memory of the Church”, ruled Prevost, “while the popes pass by”. Whoever says it with that calmness is in no hurry to leave traces. He has already decided what he wants to be. The rest, as South Side teaches, is built game after game. Or rather, apostolic journey after apostolic journey.
