Why I’m excited about our new American pope, Leo XIV, the former Bob Prevost | Opinion
There was disbelief at first, then some jumping around, yelling and exclamations in several languages. And that was just me in my home office, watching cable all by myself, after the announcement that the College of Cardinals had actually chosen an American pope.
I had read about this Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, because he was on all of the lists of papabile — men in danger of being chosen to succeed Francis. But oh me of little faith, I’d never really thought it possible because he’s also Bob from Chicago, even if he had spent most of his ministry outside the U.S. So why the yips of joy?
Those gathered for the conclave took no time at all in choosing someone who’d been close to Pope Francis, who is expected to continue the reforms Francis began, and who like his predecessor, too, stands firmly against the inhumanity of this moment in our country – his country. I also have to love a guy whose Italian I can understand.
And taking the name Leo, well. It was Leo XIII who wrote about social justice at the turn of the last century, when reforms were also urgently needed. (One tiny sample from what the previous Leo wrote about the dignity of the worker: The first thing that had to be done, he said, was to save “working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making.”)
Who am I to judge?
Yes, the former Bob Prevost is a White Sox fan, and a few of my friends who know I’m third-generation Cubs — a loyalty that demands patience — have asked me about that. To which I say, if Prevost’s Cubs-loving mother could deal, then who am I to judge?
What a nice change to have my phone blowing up with good news, in this case involving the Good News: My Peruvian friend and her Italian husband who live in Rome were ecstatic, and a DC friend on vacation in Athens said she may have alarmed some Greeks by screaming in a restaurant when she saw that the impossible had occurred.
The new pope feels so close to us, because he is. He plays Words with Friends with his brother on his phone, and when he’s home for a visit, regularly enjoys the thin-crust pepperoni pizza — already renamed the Pope-eroni in his honor — at Aurelio’s in Homewood, Illinois.
He has a couple of times tweeted — or Xed, I guess — articles from my favorite Catholic news source, the progressive Kansas City-based National Catholic Reporter, which was decades ahead of any other news outlet in reporting on clerical abuse.
And Father James Martin, the New York Jesuit known for his advocacy for LGBTQ Catholics, spoke joyfully of Leo’s election, even if so many of my progressive friends did not. Here’s a fact for you: No one eligible for the job of shepherding the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics is at any risk of getting a gig on MSNBC, if that’s even still a thing.
Did that keep Francis from being an enormous force for good in this world? You know it didn’t, and I know that that wasn’t in spite of his faith, but because of it.
Leo, who before 2016 voted in GOP primaries, seems to be a moderate, practical person, which hopefully means he can reach people on all sides everywhere. According to the Washington Post, he drove a pickup truck as a missionary in Peru, where “after a disastrous cyclone, he waded through flooded streets in rain boots to deliver aid,” and helped set up shelters after many migrants fleeing Venezuela made their way to northern Peru.
In his first homily as pope, delivered in Italian in the Sistine Chapel, he said Jesus was more admired than followed, and that even among those on the rolls as believers, a kind of “practical atheism” is not so unusual.
Follow me, but only until it makes you uncomfortable, is pretty much the opposite of what we know of what Christ taught.
“There are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd,” the new pope said, “meant for the weak and unintelligent, settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power or pleasure.”
When that happens, “a lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.” To me, nothing is more unpopular or more needed in our headed-for-the-cliff culture than mercy.
Sister Therese Bangert: ‘I rejoice’
Case in point: In January, as you may remember, Sister Therese Bangert was barred from speaking to a Kansas Senate committee against a resolution urging Kansas Governor Laura Kelly to do everything possible to enforce whatever Donald Trump wanted to do on immigration, including things he hadn’t even thought of yet.
Bangert said she was in her office in downtown KCK when she saw that there was white smoke in Rome: Habemus Papam! Cardinal Prevost, she said, was the only possible pope she really knew of, having read up on him in the National Catholic Reporter and also knowing of his work in Peru, where some of her fellow Sisters of Charity knew him as the bishop of a neighboring diocese. And her reaction?
“As a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth embedded in the tradition of St. Vincent de Paul, I rejoice that God has sent us Pope Leo XIV,” she said in an email. “Vincent was a bridge builder between those suffering the violence of poverty and war and those who had resources.
“For me, Pope Francis was a shield, both giving me protection for the times the “Church” disappoints me and making me proud to be part of Francis’ witness to servant leadership — washing the feet of those imprisoned and tirelessly by words and actions begging the human family to care for migrants and our Common Home. Pope Leo XIV puts that shield back in place for me. I am grateful to the Holy Spirit for giving us the gift of Roberto Prevost.”
Archbishop McKnight ran to St. Peter’s
Jude Huntz, a Catholic Kansas City lay chaplain for hospice patients both in their homes and in institutions, said he, too, was surprised by the choice, because “looking at those lists is like looking at NFL predictions; they’re almost never right.” And he was amazed, as the day went on, that “all of my patients were kind of giddy about it, and such a small percentage of them are Catholic. Literally everybody was watching.”
Archbishop-designate Shawn McKnight, who will lead the archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas after his installation on May 27, was already in Rome on a long-planned pilgrimage. In a phone interview from Rome, he said that when he got the word that a choice had been made, he tried to take a bus but then it got blocked, so he ended up running most of the way from the Colosseum to St. Peter’s, where he was booked to do commentary on NBC.
I lived just behind the Colosseum when I was covering the Vatican for the New York Times, and can say from walking that route many times that that is a nice hike — about 2 1/2 miles — but a long, long way to run in street clothes on the fly. I was also in St. Peter’s Square covering the 2005 conclave that gave us Pope Benedict, and waiting to see who steps out onto that loggia is kind of a cross between an Election Night, except that the crowd will cheer no matter who it is, and waiting for the jury to come back, except that no one is quiet.
“I was hot and sweaty and didn’t have my coat” for the dash to St. Peter’s, McKnight said, and also “was in shock, disbelief — was this ‘fake news’? — since Prevost “was like the old mare in the Kentucky Derby” nobody expects to actually win. “I’m still processing” what this means, he said, but “I do think it’s hopeful.”
The first Pope Leo, he reminded me, “turned away Attila the Hun from attacking Rome.” He’s “more than from America” because of his long experience in Peru, but “it helps that he would know our problems better than others would, whether in words of encouragement or words of challenge.”
So what to him does this mean for American Catholics? “We obviously feel very proud — the second pope in history to come from the new world — but what’s coming to me is a sense of responsibility and redoubling our efforts, shouldering our share.”
That’s what the synodality process that Francis began is all about — the move towards a more consultative governance. McKnight said he’s also looking to our new Holy Father to bring more transparency and accountability, especially in taking on the abuse of power. “And the financial mess the Vatican is in has to be dealt with.”
When I first interviewed McKnight a few weeks ago, after Francis chose him to succeed Archbishop Joseph Naumann in KCK, he spoke of Francis’ keen understanding of the human dimension of the church, and said how important it was that he understood that “human needs have to be tended to.”
In the days since Leo’s selection, I’ve been seeing the yearbook pictures that my Chicago friends from Notre Dame are posting of Bob in his checked pants, and enjoying, too, that among the younger University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary College grads I know, everybody’s roommate’s dad seems to know him.
Maybe you think that’s silly stuff, but is any human stuff silly? Whatever connects us is not, I would say, and whatever divides us is a lot worse than that.
This pope will I’m sure make mistakes; don’t we all? But on this day, I look to him with great hope, and with gratitude that the College of Cardinals did not decide to take a step back instead. The world needs you to be who I hope you are, Pope Leo.
