Americans packed St. Peter’s Square on Sunday to see one of their own begin his reign as pope. Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and U.S. Church leaders joined scores of American Catholics—many bearing U.S. flags—as the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV celebrated the traditional Mass of Inauguration. The Americans’ enthusiasm reflects a rare sense of unity in a deeply polarized national Church. Since Leo became pope, both its progressive and conservative factions have mostly celebrated him (some berserk corners of the internet notwithstanding). Vance, whose boss had a famously strained relationship with the last pope, emerged from a recent closed-door meeting with Leo seemingly committed to collaboration: “We’re going to find some very important things to work together on.”
If Leo’s recent predecessors are any guide, however, this American Catholic comity likely won’t last. Since 1978, when John Paul II became the first non-Italian pope in some 450 years, every pontiff has had an ambivalent, often-difficult relationship with his native country. Each in his own way broke the centuries-long pattern established by a procession of Italian popes who were intimately involved in their homeland’s politics and Church life: as opponents of Roman emperors, as secular rulers during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as prominent players in modern Italy. Pope Paul VI, the last Italian pope (other than the very brief papacy of John Paul I), reportedly wept at news of the 1978 assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro: The two had known each other since university.
The last three popes each chose very different paths between Rome and home—sometimes confrontational, sometimes aloof. Together, they offer potential models for how Leo will relate to the U.S. Church, American political leadership, and the United States more broadly.
After Jorge Bergoglio left his native Argentina in 2013 to attend the conclave that made him Pope Francis, he never returned. Francis visited several countries nearby and was not shy about engaging—or challenging—politicians and Church leaders around the world. But he remained effectively silent about Argentina, even as it cycled through three contrasting presidencies and underwent a period of extended political and economic instability. Francis rarely demurred at a question, but he was circumspect, even evasive, when asked why he never visited home.
Perhaps Francis felt that he could not intervene in Argentina with the same moral influence he frequently sought and enjoyed elsewhere. He was widely beloved there, but he left a mixed legacy. Argentinian Catholics had long debated whether Francis did enough as a local bishop to defend priests and Church interests during the country’s so-called Dirty War. Moreover, during his time as the Jesuit provincial, some critics viewed him as authoritarian. Before he became archbishop of Buenos Aires, the local hierarchy sent him far from the capital—an assignment generally considered to be a form of exile.
Leo’s relationship to America, by contrast, is less complicated, not least because he spent nearly his entire adult life elsewhere. His work as a missionary in Peru and his global travels as the head of the Augustinian religious order made him a “citizen of the world,” as New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said after the conclave. “Where he comes from,” Dolan continued, is “secondary.” True enough, theologically and ecclesially, but one has the sense that Dolan might have been trying to create breathing space for his countryman, to help him avoid being pulled into their home’s perpetual politicking.
For his part, Leo has expressed much more interest in sustaining unity than siding definitively with either the American left or right. Perhaps this will prompt him to stay out of U.S. affairs—or at least take a lighter touch than Francis did with America. But Leo’s repeated emphasis on dialogue in the early days of his papacy suggests he won’t be content to simply keep his distance, as Francis did with Argentina.
In staying away from home, Francis took the opposite approach of his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI, who made a concerted effort to engage with his native Germany. Benedict clashed theologically with its generally liberal Catholics, both before becoming pope in 2005—for example, in high-profile disputes with the dissident theologian Hans Kung—and also as pontiff, when the German Church began emerging as a vanguard of progressive Catholic causes.
As pope, Benedict visited the country three times, most notably in 2011, when he addressed the Bundestag. Though he was well received there, his visit spurred public protests and boycotts in response to Church teachings about sexual morality and national abuse scandals, including ones that Benedict had been accused of mishandling before becoming pope. It’s tempting to read into Leo’s papacy the same kind of ideological divisions that framed Benedict’s relationship with Germany: Whereas Benedict was more conservative than much of Catholic Germany, some observers see Leo as further left than U.S. Catholic leaders. But Leo doesn’t have the doctrinaire reputation that Benedict did when he became pope. Moreover, Leo’s missionary work kept him from being enmeshed in American religious affairs and politics like Benedict was in Germany’s.
By engaging in the public life of his native country, Benedict was following the example of his predecessor, John Paul II. No modern pope has—indeed few popes ever have—had as much of an impact on their homeland as John Paul II did on Poland. An estimated 11 million Poles came to see John Paul during his first papal trip to Poland, in 1979—roughly one-third of the population. They saw in their native son a confident Christian witness against communism and a reminder of their country’s religious roots, which its atheist regime had covered up. Historians and papal biographers alike count the visit as a turning point not only for Communist Poland but also in the Cold War itself. The trip inspired the Solidarity workers’ movement, one of the most successful opposition movements in the Soviet Union. Indeed, Lech Walesa signed the 1980 Gdansk Agreement, which granted Solidarity formal status as a trade union, with a pen commemorating the pope’s visit the year before.
Yet even someone as uniformly adored as John Paul in Poland wasn’t always welcomed as a source of moral authority and guidance. His first trip to Poland after the Cold War, in 1991, received a cooler and smaller response. John Paul challenged his fellow Poles to live out their newly gained freedoms in ways consistent with the Gospel and Catholic traditions, as opposed to the free market, free love, and fast food—a message that proved not as stirring as his homilies and speeches against communism.
Perhaps more divisive for Poles was his opposition to abortion, an issue he addressed in personal terms on that trip, which took place during an ongoing debate about a proposed national ban. “I cannot be indifferent to this crisis,” he said. “I too am a son of this land.” One ordinary Pole, interviewed by The New York Times, said that she disagreed with John Paul on the issue, but her broader view of him was unchanged: “He’s our pope, and I love him.” This pride and affection, uncoupled from obedience to papal authority, could provide the clearest analogy to the many American Catholics who will likely disagree with Leo’s promulgation of Church teaching, whether about abortion or immigration, but nonetheless express enthusiasm about one of their own occupying the Chair of Saint Peter.
A final model for understanding Leo’s potential approach to America comes not from past popes but from his own relationship with Peru, his chosen country. There Leo witnessed several national crises firsthand, as Matthew Casey-Pariseault, a scholar of Latin American religion and public life, has observed: “a bloody civil war, a decade-long dictatorship and an unstable post-dictatorship period that has so far led to three former presidents being handed prison sentences.” While many in the U.S. worry about an impending constitutional crisis—perhaps even civil war, a gradual descent into authoritarianism, or dictatorship—an American with experience of all of these prospects suddenly has an unrivaled platform to address them.
But don’t necessarily expect him to do so, at least not directly. Leo has shown himself to be more reserved than most of his modern predecessors. Indeed, so far as pope, he has offered only a single direct statement about his native land.
When a reporter asked if he “had any message for the United States,” he offered a standard blessing and just one more word, Whitman-like in its mysterious fullness: “Many.”
The post How Will Pope Leo Address America? Look to His Predecessors. appeared first on The Atlantic.
