ROME — Pope Leo XIV returned to the Vatican from a 11-day trip to Africa on Thursday with his papacy seemingly transformed — a pontiff known during his first year for being tempered and at times careful to a fault suddenly demonstrating an ability to roar.
Viewed as more reserved and circumspect than his predecessor, Pope Francis, who died a year ago this week, the Chicago-born leader of 1.4 billion Catholics has shown that while he was not interested in escalating the fight President Donald Trump picked with him, he also will not shrink from confronting global leaders, be they in the White House or in the troubled African nations he just visited.
His Africa trip — to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea — coupled with his mounting vocal activism against the war in Iran — has been interpreted by Vatican watchers as a pivotal turning point. Speaking as bluntly and forcefully as Francis ever did — perhaps more so — Leo chastised the industry of war, political tyranny and corruption, neocolonialism, inequality and the destructive extraction of natural resources.
Leo has spoken stridently before, and overall, there has been no change in the substance of his views, particularly his message of peace. But some Vatican officials acknowledged he is being more explicit, even as they portray his sharper messages as more a response to current events and a reflection of renewed media focus than a purposeful shift.
“The perceived change in tone is due to the escalation of events — the bombings in Iran, the African trip, the head-on clash — which have forced [his] words to become more explicit,” said the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. “But the vision was already right there, right beneath the surface.”
In Africa, the “quiet pope” delivered some of the loudest speeches of his papacy — taking aim while in Cameroon at a “handful of tyrants” and “masters of war” who have “ravaged” the world and “pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild.”
The lines were initially interpreted by some as a reference to Trump — who targeted the pope days earlier with invective on social media. Leo later said the speech was written before Trump’s missive and not directed at the U.S. leader. He also sought to downplay the tiff, saying it was “not in my interest” to debate the president.
But the morning of his departure for Africa, Leo displayed a steely side that seemed new to the public. In terms rare for any sitting pope, Leo responded directly to Trump’s attack by saying he had “no fear” of the U.S. administration and would continue to criticize those who “abuse” the Gospel. This week, he reiterated his broad critique of invocations of God to defend “death-dealing choices,” as Trump administration officials continually use religion to justify their military actions.
“God does not want this,” Leo proclaimed Tuesday on X. “His holy Name must not be profaned by the desire for domination, arrogance, or discrimination. Above all, it must never be invoked to justify death-dealing choices and actions.”
The bold language about “tyrants” in Cameroon stirred reactions there and beyond, especially from those who saw in Leo a formidable moral voice increasingly willing to speak truth to power in a violent, chaotic world.
“The beautiful thing is that when he came with that courage of being able to face Trump, he could face a cross-section of Cameroonians … the president, the ambassadors and all the administrators and politicians and lawmakers in this country … and his message did not mince words,” said George Nkuo, the Catholic Bishop in Kumbo, a regional capital in Cameroon. “It was very clear what a country should look like, who should rule, and how they should rule.”
In Angola, a southern African country with immense oil wealth but also deep poverty and a history of corruption, Leo spoke of “despots” who prefer “a populace prone to inertia, docile and subservient to power.”
Speaking at the presidential palace with Angolan President João Lourenço and civil society members in attendance, Leo took aim at extractive industries, lamenting “how much suffering, how many deaths, how many social and environmental disasters are brought about by this logic of extractivism.”
He also addressed Angola’s leaders specifically, urging them to “place the common good before particular interests, never confusing your own part with the whole.”
Inácio Kahamba, an Angolan priest, called it rare for his countrymen to witness anyone, much less an outsider, speak that way to officials.
“Pope Leo was not scared — he knows that we are suffering, and he said it,” Kahamba said.
Leo, he added, “was not scared of Trump. So we knew he would not be scared of people here. He started with the big guy.”
The pope mixed his increasingly assertive moral voice with moments of extreme empathy, as when he spoke to prisoners in Equatorial Guinea in a driving rain, declaring that “no one is excluded from God’s love.”
As he shapes what some are already calling a “pontificate of peace,” Leo, some say, is finding his voice.
“I think unquestionably [Leo’s papacy] has grown” in recent weeks, said Austen Ivereigh, a Vatican watcher and biographer of Pope Francis. “I think Leo remains the quiet American, but he is also the lion pope who has found his roar.”
Vatican officials say Leo’s unwavering stance on peace and depictions of a nonviolent God are notions he has consistently repeated since the beginning of his papacy. What’s different now, they contend, is that the Mideast war and the longest trip of his papacy have led him to repeat those messages more and, perhaps more importantly, shined a renewed media spotlight on the pope that is amplifying his message, especially after Trump’s verbal attack.
Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the media of the Holy See, said Leo “has not changed.”
“If one revisits the speeches from his first year as pope, it becomes clear that Leo has always been strong in substance,” Tornielli said. He added, “Certainly, President Trump’s messages and [Leo’s] measured responses have drawn media attention. But this strength in the Pope’s words was there even before; perhaps the media did not always notice it.”
Spadaro, however, cited three inflection points that seemed to capture the evolution of Leo’s papacy: his anti-war message on Easter Sunday; his April 7 decision to condemn directly Trump’s threat against Iranian “civilization” in which the pope also appeared to urge Americans to contact their lawmakers and call for an end to the war; and the Cameroon speech on “tyrants.”
Leo’s “dilemma lies between diplomacy and prophecy, and it’s the same as Francis, who at a certain point surrendered to the idea that he was the last moral voice of global value standing,” Spadaro said. “I believe Leo feels the same and is finding his bearings.”
Trump’s decision to target Leo, calling him “WEAK on crime”and “terrible” for foreign policy, has appeared to backfire in key ways, including amplifying Leo’s message and stature through redoubled media coverage of the pope while also riling an important Republican constituency at home — conservative American Catholics.
John Yep, president of the ultraconservative U.S.-based group Catholic for Catholics that actively supports the Trump administration, said the pope should offer “more clarity” on his statements that God does not back war of any kind. But Yep also described some of Trump’s recent statements on war and the pope as “horrible” and “vulgar” and said it would be wrong to assume that conservative Catholic voters would back the administration no matter what.
“That’s a mistake that any politician can make … to assume that we are in their camp, whatever happens. We’re not. We are loyal to Christ first,” he said.
Yep added, “Pope Leo definitely made his voice louder and stronger, and the reason is obvious, because there was a major war … which to this day threatens to spill over into neighboring countries. … So for President Trump to try to, or even Vice President JD Vance to try and push the Holy Father back into his corner, so to speak, we as a Catholic organization find that to be definitely wrong.”
The Trump-Leo spat became an unexpected frame for Leo’s Africa trip. Over the course of the journey, there was an outpouring of love for one American — Pope Leo — and rising animosity toward another — Trump.
“President Trump is unstable and volatile, and maybe he does not pay much attention to other people around the world,” said Olivera Joao-Luis, 72, as he left an early-morning Mass on Wednesday. “That is why we are facing this chaos.”
He said that Leo, meanwhile, had made his positions clear and been a forceful advocate for the Church.
“He might be more introverted than Francis,” he said. “But each pope has their own style.”
Maria de Rosario, 50, said she was proud of how the pope defended himself against Trump.
“He did so well by acting that way, by not backing down,” she said of Leo. Trump, she added, “needs to ask for forgiveness.”
“You should not criticize a person that God chose,” she said as she left Mass, before turning to a visiting journalist with a request. “As an American,” she suggested to a reporter, “maybe you can pray that Trump changes his character.”
Chason reported from Luanda, Angola. Rael Ombuor in Nairobi and Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report.
The post On Africa trip, the ‘quiet pope’ adopts a confident global voice appeared first on Washington Post.
