The College of Cardinals have elected as successor of Saint Peter a Chicago-born American, Augustinian friar and missionary Bishop, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV.
Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, I received my initial religious formation from the Augustinian Friars of the Province of Saint Thomas of Villanova, who staffed the parish I lived in and who taught in my high school. That – and my longstanding intellectual interest in and devotion to the great Doctor gratiae Saint Augustine – all added to my evident excitement when his name was announced. An American Pope! An Augustinian! His Order’s former Prior General and a long-time missionary Bishop in Peru!
As an American, a member of an international Religious Order, and a missionary Bishop in Peru (Bishop of Chiclayo, 2014-2023) the new Pope spans the New World and the Old World, the rich First World and the poor Global South. He is well positioned to be a unifying figure in a Church and a world which seem so destructively divided. A spiritual son of Saint Augustine, whose charism he referenced in his opening remarks from the loggia, he has also, by his choice of name, implicitly identified himself with the great 19th-century Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the Pope of Rerum Novarum and Aeterni Patris. Our new Pope’s opening address from the central loggia of Saint Peter’s highlighted his commitment to the tradition of Catholic social teaching so long associated with Pope Leo XIII’s response to the industrial revolution.
Before giving his first Urbi et Orbi Blessing, our new Pope greeted the world with the greeting of the Risen Christ, Peace be with you. Prior to today, it was widely assumed that no one from the U.S. would likely be elected Pope. (His membership in an international religious order and his decades of service in Latin America obviously balance his U.S. origin.) Perhaps, however, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in offering an alternative image of American leadership. In Leo XIV, the Church and the world have someone who represents the beyond-borders global character of the Universal Church and its commitment to the poor and the marginalized. That’s actually rather basic and in itself somewhat unsurprising, but it is in conspicuous contrast to so many of the values currently associated with the U.S. both domestically and on the world stage.
