To convey how all-encompassing the Roman Catholic Church was during the Middle Ages, the historian R.W. Southern once offered a striking analogy: The medieval church, he wrote in 1970, was “a compulsory society in precisely the same way as the modern state is a compulsory society.”
Like a modern nation, whose citizens typically belong to it by the accident of birth within its territory and whose obligations to obey its laws and pay taxes are typically not undertaken by choice, the medieval church could expect obedience, allegiance and what we now call “participation” from those who, by another seeming accident — baptism — found themselves within its ranks.
This idea of the Catholic Church not as a voluntary association of individuals but as a total social organism — from which one could escape only by means of excommunication, with its threat of “eternal fire” — is now hard for most of us to imagine. In the post-industrialized West, religious practice has become a choice, even for those who are baptized as infants. Catholicism, like other religions, is essentially subject to the consumer logic of the marketplace, forced to compete with other possible ways of pursuing self-actualization among a like-minded community of believers.
In the United States, of course, the Catholic Church has always operated like this: without state power, amid a variety of other religious options, often fighting for its survival. Though many of us are still reeling from the sheer improbability of Leo XIV’s election as the first American pope, the significance of his Americanness transcends the bare fact of his election. What would once have been considered his uniquely American experience of the faith — as something voluntary, improvised, provisional — has now become the default condition of Catholic life worldwide. In this respect, his origins could prove to be among his greatest assets in leading the church.
Leo XIV was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955. The jokes write themselves — about “da pope,” about imposing deep dish pizza on the Italian peninsula by papal edict, about Leo’s election having been prophesied in 2006 by Dennis Green, the coach of the Arizona Cardinals, who in a memorable rant invited the news media to “crown” the Chicago Bears. But when Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, was asked this month by NBC News about the elevation of an American pontiff, he wept. “The culture of Chicago and the Midwest produced a pope,” he said. “That’s terrific.”
It is terrific. And if anything, Cardinal Cupich’s regional pride (which, as a Michigander, I share) undersells the distinctively American character of Leo’s experience.
The descendant of Creoles — his mother’s family’s race was listed as Black in the census of 1900 — Leo was raised in a parish in Chicago where the church he attended is now deconsecrated, its walls streaked with graffiti. He has two brothers who are almost archetypes of their generation: John, a Wordle-playing retired school principal and lifelong Chicago-area resident; and Louis, a Florida transplant and vociferous MAGA supporter who has described himself as “not the most religious person.” The brothers’ rise from modest brick houses to the professional classes, their dispersion across political and geographical lines — this is the post-Vatican II American Catholic story in miniature. It is a story of fracture, mobility, volition.
When Leo was elected to the papacy, the three brothers still spoke weekly by phone. That Leo, despite spending most of his mature ecclesial career abroad in Peru and Rome, has managed to navigate the shifting terrain of the past half century without losing hold of his brothers — without, one might say, ceasing to be their brother — is no small thing. It suggests a talent not only for mediation but also for holding together what history has pulled apart.
This unifying instinct is also evident in Leo’s earlier remarks as a priest. Speaking at a synod in 2012 on the challenge of evangelization in the modern world, Father Prevost remarked that the Catholic Church often finds itself speaking a different language than the culture around it. Would-be listeners, he observed, are conditioned to find the Gospel message not merely wrong but “ideological and emotionally cruel.” In this environment, he suggested, speaking the truth is not enough; evangelization must understand the unwelcoming context in which it operates. To present the truth in love, he argued, is a matter not only of what the church teaches but also how, when and to whom.
This is a far cry from the academic perspective of the theology department or the bureaucratic outlook of the chancery office. Leo appears to see the Catholic Church not as a theory to be tested or a program to be implemented but as a thing to be lived — haphazardly, inconsistently, often with more fervor than clarity.
It is worth noting that Leo’s predecessor and namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to reflect at length on the United States. In “Longinqua oceani,” an encyclical from 1895, Leo XIII regarded the United States favorably, with a mixture of admiration and guarded optimism. Nonetheless, he continued to view America as something of an ecclesiastical periphery, a promising outpost, perhaps, but one that depended upon the spiritual and intellectual reinforcement of Europe. He did not imagine a world in which the American church would one day be in a position to represent Catholicism more broadly.
Americans are often parochial, and not in a good sense. But it is possible that our strange and uneven relationship with the Catholic faith has given us insight. Catholicism in this country arrived late — at the twilight of Christendom. It survived not by imperial privilege but by adaptation. It endured as an ethnic identity and the source of a moral vocabulary for politicians that gave us both the New Deal and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Today it is being revitalized by hundreds of thousands of Hispanic immigrants and a countercultural youth movement of urban parishes filled with Latin, incense and crying babies.
Anyone who can speak to this cacophony — who can describe it without resorting to caricature, without reducing the American Catholic Church to MAGA hats or rainbow flags — might just possess the imagination necessary to comprehend the whole of the faith.
For the universality of the Catholic Church is not abstract; it is as richly textured as Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” cosmopolitan but disorderly. It includes traditionalist devotees of the Latin Mass, those accustomed to modern acculturated Masses in Latin America and Africa and hundreds of millions of churchgoers who have never given a thought to the liturgy. It includes the lapsed, the divorced and the remarried. It includes the persecuted remnant of the faithful in Burma, the slum children of Manila, Polish grandmothers, Japanese adherents of Our Lady of Akita and, yes, the sort of sports-mad Chicagoans memorably evoked by the character Bill Swerski and his fellow superfans on “Saturday Night Live” (“Da Bears”).
If Leo manages to encompass all of this, his American origins will surely be part of the reason. His election is not evidence of the Vatican’s final capitulation to modernity but a reminder that, whatever its challenges, the church persists — not as a fortress or an intellectual proposition but as a people.
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Matthew Walther is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. He is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.
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