What challenges are in store for Pope Leo XIV?

The Catholic Church has a new pope, and for the first time, he is an American. Pope Leo XIV was elected on Thursday, succeeding Pope Francis, who died in April. Leo, a 69-year-old native of Chicago, has held several roles in the Church, including serving as a bishop in Peru and leading the Order of St. Augustine. Most recently, he was the head of a board tasked with choosing new bishops. And according to his brother, Leo is a longtime White Sox fan. While these biographical details are important and offer some insight into the man behind the title, they cannot tell us much about the biggest questions raised by Leo’s ascension: Where will he lead his Church? Will he usher in reforms? And how will he approach the many challenges facing the institution? To answer those questions, and others, I turned to Michele Dillon, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire, and a scholar on the Catholic Church. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. What do people need to know about the new pope? What’s very impressive is the range of experiences that Pope Leo XIV brings to the role. He has been a missionary on the ground in Peru for 20 years, and so knows firsthand the needs of the local churches in poor peripheral areas that are a key concern and of great importance to the Church. It’s also very important that he has, most recently, been head of the Dicastery — the department at the Vatican in charge of bishops — so, he really has been very strongly involved in vetting and making new appointments of bishops, as well as recommending bishop appointments across the whole world. The network of bishops [he developed] will be important, not just formally, but also informally. Presumably, he can literally get on the phone and ask a particular bishop in a particular diocese [for advice or information]. And it’s important to know that he’s an Augustinian, and was the head of the Augustinian order, so he brings that Augustinian tradition, which is a very significant part of the church — theologically, and in terms of the world today. Of course, the very fact that he’s American is obviously a big surprise, but there’s always the uncertainty that every cardinal who goes in there, any one of them, can emerge as the pope. We’re always surprised who the next pope is. In part, what tipped the balance in favor of his papacy is not only is he an American, but he is so deeply rooted in South America. I imagine that the South American and Central American cardinals would have a lot of respect for him, as would the cardinals from Africa and Asia, who really do appreciate that missionary tradition and experience. He truly is a great American from Chicago, which has a very proud history and still today a very vibrant Catholicism on the ground in all those parishes across Chicago, but he also brings his other experience outside of America to this job. Overall, he brings really deep pastoral experience, plus executive management experience. He understands the work of the Vatican, the internal workings of the Vatican bureaucracy, and is probably fairly adept at navigating its complexities. What are some of the challenges — and some of the big decisions — Pope Leo will face? It’s not as if there’s some looming decision on his desk. But certainly there are a lot of ongoing, pressing issues in the Church. One of those are the Vatican finances, which have been a recurring issue. Francis himself made a lot of efforts to bring reform to the Vatican Bank and to its accounting practices. He had some success in making it a little bit more transparent; he brought in some outside experts, although that wasn’t necessarily very successful, because many of those ended up leaving for one reason or another, sometimes under the cloud of scandal. And of course, during Francis’s term, we had embezzlement charges against Cardinal Becciu, who couldn’t vote in this most recent conclave. Those embezzlement charges are reminiscent ones that we’ve had every decade, certainly in my life, going back to the Banco Ambrosiano corruption scandal that made its way into The Godfather Part III. It’s a major problem because — obviously, you don’t want mismanagement — but also, though the Vatican has a lot of assets; it has a lot of expenses. And the growth area of Catholicism today is in the poorest regions of the world, in Africa and parts of Asia. It relies on money from America to a large extent, which gives disproportionately to its share of the Catholic population globally. [Another issue will likely be] continuing the Vatican’s diplomacy. In the Israel and Palestine situation and the Russia-Ukraine situation, the Vatican has been actively involved in making diplomatic interventions and trying to work behind the scenes, as it always does in these situations. Pope Leo XIV mentioned peace several times in his opening comments. And clearly, that’s something that he’s going to be weighing — something that probably has long been weighing on his mind, and as pope, I would imagine that would be a pressing priority for him. Then, you have to deal with all the various debates within the Catholic Church. Many of these are very Euro- and American-centric debates that have to do with sexual morality and the role of women. These are things that are more salient here in the Northern Hemisphere and to some extent, in South America, but less so in Africa and Asia. That’s sort of a tension within the global church, and it’s certainly something that he will need to be paying attention to. Finally, all people who have gone up the hierarchy of the Church have, in one way or another, have become implicated in various clerical sex abuse scandals — not that they themselves committed sex abuse, but often [had some] regard as to how the issues were dealt with, whether that’s within an order, such as the Augustinian order that current Pope Leo headed, or whether it’s in their role as a bishop. These are things that are a pressing issue across the world. Do we have any sense of how Pope Leo might approach some of these issues? The Church has made really significant advances in terms of safeguarding children from sex abuse, and so it’s a matter of making sure that [these safeguards are] enforced and are [meeting] the goals that they’re intended to serve. That’s something he would need to pay attention to. The commission [on sexual assault] that was set up in the Vatican by Pope Francis — he will need to revitalize that commission. Many of the members have spoken out over the years that they feel that they were not being fully supported by other church officials within the Vatican, or that, in various ways, their work was being hindered. That’s one thing that he could make a decision on fairly early to really empower that group and give them the resources that they need. I think the issue of women in the church will be on the back burner. I don’t think he’s going to say too much about that in the early days, [to avoid] being seen as nodding in a particular way to anyone’s so-called faction within the church. I might be wrong, and I may be well surprised. There have been several commissions looking at women deacons, for example; he could make a decision in that regard, but those commissions themselves have been so controversial, and during Francis’s tenure, he didn’t even release the names of people on the commission, so I’d be surprised if this new pope were to suddenly make that a top priority. You mentioned that different factions exist. Are there factions that are maybe more heartened by the elevation of this pope than others? I would say that all the people who were very supportive of Francis’s papacy will certainly be very happy with this choice. I also think that those who had certain reservations about Francis will be open to giving this new pope a chance, recognizing that he seems to be a man of great character and of experience. Catholicism has always been a pluralistic tradition, with lots of geographical diversity, doctrinal diversity, and social diversity. And Pope Leo XIV emphasized unity in his early remarks, recognizing that in Catholicism, you can have diversity and still have community. You don’t have to agree about everything, but you can still be a unified community in a positive dynamic way. I would think people would want to give him whatever support they can to see how he moves the church forward in this moment of where there is factionalism. Oftentimes, that factionism is exaggerated because it makes news. I don’t like using the terms “liberal” and “conservative” and “progressive” because they don’t fully align with how we think of liberal, conservative, progressive politically. But most American Catholics are moderate Catholics, and that they’ve long been moderate Catholics. They appreciate and want to be participants in the full sacramental life of the Church, and they’re very proud of their Catholic identity, but they’ve disagreed for years. A lot of American Catholics do go their own way on some of these issues of sexual morality, but they’re nonetheless proud Catholics and committed to the tradition. What does the fact that the cardinals chose Pope Leo tell us about where the Church might be going? The fact that he chose the name Pope Leo [is telling]. Leo XIII was really the beginning pope for the Catholic social justice tradition, as we call it today. He was the pope in the latter years of the 19th century, into the very first years of the 20th century — a time of tremendous social and economic change, expansion of industrialization, expansion of factory life, urbanization. He was very sensitive to the impacts of all those structural changes on the ordinary lives of people, particularly factory workers and other employees. And he wrote what became maybe the first social encyclical, Rerum novarum, where he really emphasized the importance of concern for employees, for just wages, and full inclusion of everyone in society — even as the race for for profit might often mean that people get marginalized and pushed aside. That really has been, in various guises, the consistent message of Catholic social teaching in the decades since. The choice of Leo, to me, was extremely significant, because that really is one thing that would signal Pope Leo XIV’s commitment to further amplifying the church’s social justice tradition. That’s something which Pope Francis did, and other popes did before him, but certainly Pope Francis amplified it and elevated it more. Now, he didn’t call himself Francis II, which I think is a good thing. It’s good to have a new name. But that he chose Leo shows that he wants to bring the church — in [a way] that’s fully in tune with the earliest gospel — into all these big issues today, whether it’s climate change, economic inequality, refugees and asylum seekers, all those complex issues, [in a manner that] comes from some of the core principles articulated by Leo XIII. This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

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What challenges are in store for Pope Leo XIV?