Just days into the papacy of Leo XIV, the new pope has begun to lay out his vision for how he will lead the Catholic church.
Like his predecessor, he plans to embrace the poor and the marginalized. He wants to continue Francis’s effort to fling open the doors of the Vatican and listen to many voices outside the church hierarchy. And in a clear sign that this is a pope keenly attuned to the biggest tests of modernity, he said the church would address the challenge that artificial intelligence will pose to “human dignity, justice and labor.”
As the leader of close to 1.4 billion followers, a population that equals the size of China or India, Pope Leo’s words matter to nearly one out of every six people in the world. He also has a powerful global pulpit, so the issues he chooses to focus on can resonate far beyond the Catholic brethren.
Francis’s energy, charisma and compassion reminded not just Catholics but those of other faiths and in secular circles that a pope can be a public voice in ethical life.
Francis took up the mantle of the poor and migrants, as well as the urgent need to respond to climate change. He was a man of potent gestures, such as making his first official trip to Lampedusa, the tiny Mediterranean island where thousands of desperate asylum seekers and migrants sought to enter Europe, or visiting prisons to kiss the feet of inmates. Just before he was admitted to the hospital in February, he took on the mass deportation policies of President Trump, calling them a violation of the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”
Leo takes over the papacy at a tumultuous time in global affairs. Wars are being fought on several fronts, the political sphere in many countries is polarized, economic inequality is rising and people are struggling to make basic human connections through a sea of disinformation and diversion on social media.
“We’re in a moment when the moral forces of the world and religious forces of the world have a deep responsibility to say it doesn’t have to be this way,” said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a Protestant minister and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.
Every pope uses his global platform to emphasize certain issues. John Paul II played a significant role in the collapse of Soviet and European Communism, planting the seeds of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland when he made his first visit as pope to his home country. Millions of people came to hear him speak, acting independently of the Communist government, which emboldened them to protest against their authoritarian leaders.
Benedict XVI, a conservative scholar who sought to wrench the church back to basic doctrine, emerged as a critic of the American war in Iraq and a champion of environmental protection.
Popes do not always represent moral rectitude. In the most glaring example, the credibility of the Catholic church has been severely undermined by a widespread sexual abuse crisis that survivors and critics have said multiple pontiffs have mishandled.
Scholars are still debating whether Pius XII, the pope during World War II, knew about the Holocaust and did not confront Hitler, or stayed publicly silent because he was secretly arranging for — or at least permitting — local Catholics to save Jews from the Nazis.
The pope’s global recognition allows him to speak with a singular force. As a figure who transcends national interests, he can nudge political leaders to act for the collective good.
Francis, for example, in 2015 wrote the first papal encyclical to focus on the environment, describing climate change as a threat whose greatest consequences fell on the shoulders of the poor. That same year, 195 nations signed a landmark agreement in Paris and at least 10 world leaders cited the pope’s words during addresses to the United Nations climate conference.
A pope’s sway, though, has its limits, subject to the mercurial shifts of international politics, cultural battles and macroeconomic upheaval. And one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholicism — to advocate for peace — is often the hardest goal to reach.
Francis said he was on a “secret mission” to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine, got down on his hands and knees to kiss the feet of the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition and, in his final Easter speech before he died, made explicit appeals for peace in Ukraine and Gaza, which Leo echoed again on Sunday.
As just one voice on the world stage, a pope’s ability to orchestrate change depends on the global political context. Francis became pope at a time when there were natural allies like former President Barack Obama in the United States and former Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany who supported his immigrant-friendly message. By the time Francis died, the world had shifted to a more right-leaning order, with President Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy.
Pope Francis “missed the zeitgeist that migrant issues are more complicated and there are trade-offs,” said Miles Pattenden, a historian at Oxford, who studies the Catholic Church. If the new pope, he added, “carries on and just keeps saying what Francis did, he will become more and more marginal.”
On some issues in the culture war, activists on either side may seek to claim the new pope as their own. Liberals will embrace his advocacy on behalf of the downtrodden. Conservatives will urge Leo to stick to current Catholic doctrine on issues like gay marriage.
In the United States, where the new pope was born and raised, some hope Leo will continue Francis’s role as a counterweight to President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. “With the religious right in the U.S. having sort of captured religion, and claiming that their faith backs up their political views, having a pope from the U.S.” who could challenge some of Trump’s pronouncements “is significant,” said Kaira Jewel Lingo, a Buddhist author and Dharma teacher based in upstate New York.
It is far too early to know how Pope Leo will exercise his voice outside the church. Religious leaders warn against shoehorning him into neat political frameworks.
People tend to project their desire for the pope to play for their team, asking “is he pro-Trump or is he against Trump, as if Trump is the only thing that matters in the world,” said Graham Tomlin, the director of the Center for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington in the Anglican Church. “But actually the left-right polarity just misses out on all the really interesting things about religion.”
Many constituencies want the pope to speak for their pet causes, but he can also speak to a desire for basic decency and acceptance, across religion.
“If what he says and what he stands for is honoring all the different people on earth, it’s a person in power with so much influence who can say those things,” said Samantha Berman, 31, who is Jewish and originally from Connecticut but currently teaching art in Rome.
That alone, she said, can “make so many people feel seen, heard, loved.”
Josephine de La Bruyère and Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
