Newly elected Pope Leo XIV‘s significance as leader of the Catholic Church is beyond dispute, but the papacy’s role has historically extended far beyond the altar and pews.
For more than a century, the papacy has shaped American affairs—through spiritual and cultural guidance—but also by quietly influencing major geopolitical shifts and cultural developments.
From Cold War diplomacy to modern discussions on climate change and human rights, various popes have engaged with U.S. leaders behind the scenes, acting as mediators, moral voices and, at times, catalysts for historic change.
Some historians have suggested that the medieval papacy pioneered the concept of ambassadors, said Ben Wiedemann, lecturer at Cambridge University who specializes in the political role of the medieval papacy.
“Kings would keep semi-permanent ‘proctors’ at the papal court,” he told Newsweek. “In the middle ages, the papal court was where international disagreements tended to be mediated.”
The Pope’s Diplomatic Role
Perhaps the most famous example of a pope’s role in global affairs is Pope John Paul II’s association with the fall of communism.
John Paul, a bishop from Poland who was head of the Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005, embarked on a 1979 pilgrimage to Poland when it was still under Soviet rule and officially an atheist country.
This is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the Cold War, as his words are believed to have helped inspire the Polish Solidarity movement.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote in his account of the Cold War: “When John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland – and ultimately everywhere – would come to an end.”
Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who would capture his first term in the White House the following year, said at the time: “I have had a feeling, particularly in the pope’s visit to Poland, that religion may turn out to be the Soviets’ Achilles’ heel.”
A more recent example is Pope Francis‘ involvement in thawing relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
In 2014, he facilitated secret negotiations by sending personal letters to Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, urging them to restore diplomatic ties.
After finally agreeing on a deal, both leaders thanked Francis for the role he played. “His Holiness Pope Francis issued a personal appeal to me and to Cuba’s president,” Obama said at the time.
He called the deal some of the “most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.”
“We will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Obama said.
Grant Kaplan, professor of theology at Saint Louis University, explained why he thinks popes are able to play such a unique role in global politics.
“A lot of recent popes have actually been former diplomats,” he told Newsweek, “and so this kind of network of diplomacy that the Catholic Church has is an advantage in the sense that they’re not a state that has economic interests or is looking to expand its territory or something – they’re naturally seen as like a Switzerland kind of place.”
“You don’t have to worry about their angle on things, so they can be more trusted,” he added. “The Vatican is always sending people to intervene in the Middle East, in Ukraine – sometimes it’s not very successful, but sometimes it’s quite successful.”
The Pope’s Cultural Role
The pope also has a more direct role on everyday Americans, in the sense that he is the head of a church followed by 20 percent of the country. Some 53 million U.S. adults are Catholic, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2024.
“There’s a lot of Catholics in the United States who take seriously what the pope says as part of their faith,” Kaplan said. “So even if the pope isn’t trying to speak to leaders, he can still influence the political wins by speaking to people as the leader of their faith community.”
He cited John Paul’s Theology of the Body, which taught that sexuality was more than a mere biological drive but rather a “sacrament”—a sign of God’s love.
“It was basically insisting that the person can’t be divorced from the body,” Kaplan explained. “He famously said that ‘the problem with pornography isn’t that it reveals too much, it’s that it reveals too little,’ in the sense that it divorces the soul from the body as an object.”
John Paul delivered 129 lectures on this from 1979 to 1984, during the years following America’s sexual revolution of the 1960s and early ’70s.
The theology “became very popular and was taught at parish levels and in schools,” Kaplan said. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops incorporated it into its doctrine and family planning resources.
Kaplan argued that this kind of power wielded by the pope may actually be more potent than his strength pertaining to diplomacy.
“Cultural and spiritual impact matter more in the long term,” he said. “One of the phrases that people use is that ‘politics is downstream from culture’ and I generally believe that’s a good way to understand influence.”
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