Will Pope Leo XIV heal, resist or appease?

Gavin Ashenden• May 12, 2025

The election of a new father in God reconfigures the Catholic Church. The Church is part institution and, with a father in God, part family; a symbiosis of two different modes of being.

A new pope brings the opportunity to assess his gifts as leader of the institution and also to learn to love him as our “father in God”.

To love our pope we have to get to know him. And so Catholics all over the world are getting better acquainted with Pope Leo XIV, the former Cardinal Bob from Chicago.

Already the furore over conflicting information about his allegiances has begun.

If you come from Chicago you will know that what amounts to hysteria about disinformation has erupted. And for once it’s not about the the Latin Mass, important though it is.

It is about what kind of baseball fan Bob was – a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan.

His dad, aptly enough, supported the St Louis Cardinals. But one brother, thinking he knew the answer, actually got it terribly wrong. Family don’t always know best. Their mother was from the north side of Chicago, and so he simply presumed Bob would support the Cubs.

Even brothers can get it wrong. It turned out the Cardinal Prevost was a Sox supporter. The White Sox baseball team went wild with joy.

A local fast food joint jumped on the cheery bandwagon. They now advertise themselves with the jaunty Latin tag, “Canes nostros ipse comedit” (he has eaten our dogs).

But with every hour that passes, a profile of our new pope is being put together to help us understand what the new election has brought the Church.

The easiest analysis was to reflect on the significance of the name Cardinal Prevost chose.

Leo has several obvious connotations. Leo the Great not only initiated the most powerful reforms of the Church of his day. In 452 he personally confronted Attila the Hun and persuaded not to attack and sack Rome.

In the conflict between the forces of paganism and the Church he proved to be a saviour of the Church.

But Leo XIII, as the direct predecessor, may claim to be a more proximate inspiration.

Pope Leo XIV addressed the question of his papal name almost immediately:

“There were many reasons, but mainly Leo XIII who in his historical encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question, in the context of the first Industrial Revolution…In our own day the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her teaching in response to another Industrial Revolution – in the field of Artificial Intelligence that poses new challenges to human dignity.”

He offered a profound theological analysis of the secular challenge from a threatening industrial revolution that diminished the dignity of humanity, but did so without falling prey to the lure of socialism. (“It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, the community of goods, must be utterly rejected,” he wrote.)

Additionally there was another famous dimension to the Papacy of Leo XIII. He experienced a defining metaphysical encounter with evil that prompted him to invite the Church to prepare for the coming century.

While celebrating Mass in the Vatican, he collapsed under the impact of a terrifying vision of the spiritual struggle that would be a defining factor of the 20th century between Satan and the Catholic Church. As a consequence, he composed prayers to the archangel St Michael inviting the whole Church to ask for archangelic help after each Mass on Sundays. Pope Leo XIII combined formidable intellectual as well as spiritual resources at the service of protecting the Church during a period of aggressive social and political turmoil.

Our new pope has indicated that he is only too aware that we are at a critical juncture in the life of the Church in relation to a defining cultural and philosophical change. At the beginning of this century, as at the end of the nineteenth, a new re-configuration of pagan philosophy, culture and practice has unleashed itself upon the Church and the Church needs to be reinvigorated, renewed and defended. The dehumanising threat of AI is as dangerous as any of the totalitarian and utopian movements of the last 150 years.

There have been a number of attempts to make assessments of Cardinal Prevost’s character. Who is Bob from Chicago? What are his gifts and temperament?

This is probably the least satisfactory area of enquiry. Apart from other factors, the office of Saint Peter does something to a man, to the uniqueness of his personhood. The office adds something.

But in combining the gifts of the Augustinian spiritual and theological tradition with the intellectual capacity of a canon lawyer, he brings a fertile spirituality allied to a clarity of thought that may be exactly what is needed following a decade of ambiguity and chaos. 

Pope Francis may be remembered in particular for two phrases: “Go and make a mess” and “who am I to judge?”. History will assess the strengths and weaknesses of his papacy, but for the moment there are arguments about the extent to which there will be continuity or discontinuity from Francis.

As the conclave approached we were faced with the unhelpful political polarities of the political language of left and right, progressive and conservative. In my own conversations with interviewers, particularly with an eye to parallels with the 1930s, I thought it better to talk instead of an analysis of the relationship with the surrounding secular culture. In the dynamics of the run up to the conflict with Nazism, should we chose appeasement or resistance? Would the Cardinals choose a Chamberlain or Churchill?

The famous economist Thomas Sowell offered his reflections on what the appointment of Leo XIV might mean as a successor to Pope Francis. His analysis of the Francis project was as follows:

“Pope Francis didn’t change doctrine. He did something more subtle, far more dangerous; he changed the tone. He muddied the boundaries.

“His strategy was not frontal assault, but instead a gradual corrosion.

“He did not defy tradition, he reframed it until its sharp edges were dulled beyond recognition. In economic terms, he was practising a form of spiritual inflation, increasing the supply of empathy while diluting its purchasing power of clarity.

“Robert Prevost is not an outright reformer. He is a company man. It’s not a continuation of Francis’ pastoral openness. It is instead a kind of conservative pragmatism wrapped in the aesthetics of continuity.”

Sowell sees the binary choice of appeasement or resistance as too stark.

“Pope Francis nudged from the left, Pope Leo may tighten the leash just enough to keep the conservatives pacified while avoiding open war with the modern world.”

But Sowell does also adopt the language of appeasement and resistance.

He points out that the Catholic Church faces one of the most ideologically fanatical cultures of all time; one predicated on a form of illusion.  He too insists that if the Church fails to change the world it will instead be changed by it. He claims that a willingness to offend lies at the heart of the evangelistic task. He calls Pope Francis’ pontificate “the triumph of relevance over reverence”. But relevance won’t convert or change the culture. The Church has never gained influence by being liked, only by holding to the Truth and all the more effectively when that Truth is found uncomfortable or offensive by the world. Relevance is an evangelistic dead end. It gains momentary attention, prior to be jettisoned. It is a homeopathic form of mission. It runs the risk of inoculating the patient against the real faith for ever.

From this perspective the question takes a different form: will Pope Leo allow the Church to be Catholic? To be Catholic is always to be offensive. Our beliefs are diametrically opposed to those of our surrounding culture.  For the Catholic, truth is not optional; sin exists; male and female are real categories; life begins before birth; marriages has a given structure; grace requires obedience.

We are offensive.

As of now, the new pope’s language gives nothing away. He uses the classical language of Catholic spirituality, while also praising Francis. But courtesy is not necessarily condoning. He praises Francis’ synodal Church. But synodality for Francis was a covert strategy to nudge first Catholic practice, and later Catholic Truth, into a different shape by means of reference to activist focus groups.

But synodality can mean different things. It does not have to restrict itself to that semi-democratic politicised activist-centred lobbying process. It can also genuinely become what Pope Leo described it once as: a process of resisting unnecessary and unwelcome polarisation.

In the heated debate on doctrinal authority for national episcopal conferences during the final phase of the Synod on Synodality in 2024, Pope Leo expressed himself moderately and cautiously:

“The whole understanding of synodality is not that all of a sudden there is going to be a fully democratic, assembly-style way of exercising authority in the Church.

“The primacy of Peter and of the successors of Peter, the bishop of Rome, of the pope, is something which enables the Church to continue to live communion in a very concrete way.”

“Synodality can have a great impact on how we are living in the Church, but it certainly takes nothing away from what we would call the primacy.”

This is discontinuity with the Francis project even if the language is the same.

The fear that fuelled the civil war within the Catholic Church under Francis was that the pope was covertly driving a non-Catholic accommodation with secularists over feminism and homosexuality.

All that fear has been removed at a stroke by the discovery that as a bishop and Cardinal, Robert Prevost refused outright what he called the “clericalisation of women” and was vocal in criticising the homosexual lifestyle as being “at odds with the Gospel”.

The civil war that has been bubbling away in the last 12 years may suddenly evaporate. But there is healing required as well as fires to put out.

If he rescinds Traditiones Custodes and restores Benedict’s permission to use the “Mass of the Ages”, he will also heal the Church as well as dampening down the crisis of contested culture.

Will he adopt a different hierarchy of political values to Trump and Vance? He may. But that will be incidental to the core faith of the Church, not critical to it. Has his time as a bishop in a desperately poor diocese in Peru affected his views on immigration? Perhaps. But so long as he does not replace the Mother of God with the indigenous fertility goddess, Pachamama, it will be a talking point not a breaking point.

Laudamus Deo. Habemus Papam Catholicam.

Photo: Pope Leo XIV arrives for an audience with thousands of journalists and media workers on May 12, 2025 at Paul VI Hall in Vatican City, Vatican. The audience with journalists has become a tradition among newly elected popes. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)