If you’re wondering what to make of Pope Leo XIV, the best thing to do, believe it or not, is wait and see.
That’s the hardest thing to do, to refrain from quick judgement, the instant hot take. Nearly impossible today, such patience doesn’t suit the business model of news-as-stimulant, the algorithms, the addicted twitch of our thumbs scrolling in search for the next new bit of information; true or false, it often doesn’t matter.
What are we to make of this new pope? We want to know now, to settle our minds now whether we should love him or hate him.
Biographies, magically already written, are already being sold. You can already stream documentaries quickly patched together.
And then there’s that carnival of conspiracies formerly known as Twitter, that playground of the ill-read and ill-willed. What’s my tribe’s consensus? Is he progressive or conservative? What does Steve Bannon think of him? There’s a podcast for that. What does Fr. James Martin think of him? There’s a podcast for that, too.
What I am saying is that while wanting to know more about Pope Leo XIV is a good desire, there is a wrong way to go about it, the way we often go about such things.
Scrambling to form an opinion, we scour the internet; we don’t learn much of anything, but we do reinforce our identities as tribalized consumers. We keep the grift going.
Anyway, I won’t waste more time on this, I just think it’s necessary to it our present disability, that we’re not very good at managing information today, forming real opinions. It is the great irony of our media-saturated age, in fact. But that is another topic.
Leo’s tradition
Back to Leo XIV, and how to understand him. If you really want to learn about him, first pray for him. Prayer is a form of knowing.
I also recommend thoughtful listening and reading. Popes speak from within a particular tradition. When we hear the words of a pope, steeped in that tradition, yet interpret them by the lights of fleeting politics, tired anti-Catholic tropes or the binary stupidities of culture wars, we make fools of ourselves.
To try to grasp what a pope is saying while ignorant of Catholic tradition is like butting in on a deep, ongoing conversation and asking what he thinks about our shoes.
Believe it or not, it’s not completely his responsibility to be immediately relevant; it’s equally our responsibility to try to understand him, which, as I said, demands we have some familiarity with Catholicism. Thus, if you really want to know about Pope Leo XIV, get to reading. It’s not that hard; it’s just it may convert you.
Leo’s constellation
Han Urs von Balthasar, the great 20th-century theologian, wrote that to understand the pope, one must understand him within his “constellation.” That is, we must see the pope in relation to, and sometimes in tension with, not only other biblical figures — like John the Apostle or Mary, the mother of Jesus, for example, each bearing his or her own theological significance — but also in relation to, and sometimes in tension with, other saints and theologians and popes of the past.
What is Pope Leo’s constellation? Besides his immediate predecessors, with whom he has already claimed continuity, two figures from the tradition stand out: St. Augustine and Pope Leo XIII. Get to know them to get to know him. Since, I recommend you start reading, start with these two.
That Pope Leo XIV is thoroughly Augustinian suggests he will be honest about both good and evil in the world, honest about how, in both individual souls and in society, the love of God and self-love are engaged in constant battle.
As a student of St. Augustine, Pope Leo knows where evil comes from, knows the origin of the pride of politics and the violence that follows it. He will understand our pretensions, the willfulness at the heart of both conservative and progressive aggressions. And he will be no fool or fodder for our broken politics. He will be no believer at all in the liberal myths of progress nor enamored by any vainglorious politician.
He won’t give in to any sort of nationalism, the heresy that somehow America (or any other nation) is some sort of chosen vessel of the Lord. For he will believe, as St. Augustine clearly taught, that the only true commonwealth, the only real bearer of hope for our predicament is the church, that all else eventually fades away but the City of God. Which is a healthy medicine, if you ask me, for our diseased, self-important, politicized minds.
But then there’s Leo XIII. Addressing the cardinals the other day, the pope said that one of the reasons he took the name Leo was to take inspiration from Leo XIII, the father of modern Catholic social teaching, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum roused the modern church to face the challenges of industrial modernity.
Pope Leo XIV thinks the church needs again to face the “social question,” this time looking at the existential challenges posed by technology and artificial intelligence, but to defend the same things Leo XIII defended: “human dignity, justice and labor.”
As Leo XIII sought to defend the individual and the family from the bleakness of atheist materialism and communism, as well as from the soul-destroying and family-destroying demands of unrestrained capitalism, you can expect Leo XIV to poke the bear of global capitalism, the unquestionable immorality of our supply chains, and the immoral idiocy of blind technological optimism.
You can expect him to speak up for living wages, for workers who shouldn’t be replaced by technology. You can expect him to speak out against the designed alienation of that same technology, the pandemic of loneliness. And you can expect him to speak out against some of the pathologies caused by such loneliness, our sometimes-celebrated existential confusions.
Of course, you can expect him to speak up for migrants and refugees, even if it risks insulting American politicians, even if it risks insulting you.
And you can expect him to continue to speak up for the unborn and for the poor, because that’s what God wants him to do, never mind our allegedly more sophisticated views. The voice of Peter will trump it all.
What I think we’ll hear from this pope is truth, but with the forceful echoes of St. Augustine and Leo XIII, and in a new key, out of tune, I suspect, with the current madness of the world. Which I believe we need, and for which I’ll be grateful.