Pope Leo XIV holds prayer vigil with young people Aug. 2 during the Youths Jubilee at the Tor Vergata field in Rome.
NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press
VATICAN| CATHOLIC CHURCH
When Pope Leo XIV surprised tens of thousands of young people at a recent Holy Year celebration with an impromptu popemobile romp around St. Peter’s Square, it almost seemed as if some of the informal spontaneity that characterized Pope Francis’ 12-year papacy returned to the Vatican.
Still, the message Leo delivered that night was all his own: In seamless English, Spanish and Italian, Leo told the young people they were the “salt of the Earth, the light of the world.” He urged them to spread their hope, faith in Christ and their cries of peace.
Robert Prevost marked his 100th day as Pope Leo this month. He seems eager above all to avoid polemics or making the papacy about himself, and wants instead to focus on Christ and peace.
Avoiding polemics
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Leo certainly went out of his way in his first 100 days to try to heal divisions that deepened during Francis’ pontificate, offering messages of unity and avoiding controversy at almost every turn. Even his signature issue — confronting the promise and peril posed by artificial intelligence — is something conservatives and progressives alike agree is important. Francis’ emphasis on caring for the environment and migrants often alienated conservatives.
Closer to home, Leo offered the Holy See bureaucracy a reassuring, conciliatory message after Francis’ occasionally authoritarian style rubbed some in the Vatican the wrong way.
“Popes come and go, but the Curia remains,” Leo told Vatican officials soon after his May 8 election.
Continuity undeniable
Leo cemented Francis’ environmental legacy by celebrating the first-ever ecologically inspired Mass. He furthered that legacy by giving the go-ahead for the Vatican to turn a 1,000-acre field north of Rome into a vast solar farm that should generate enough electricity to meet Vatican City’s needs and turn it into the world’s first carbon-neutral state.
He fine-tuned financial transparency regulations that Francis initiated, tweaked other decrees to give them consistency and logic, and confirmed Francis in deciding to declare one of the 19th century’s most influential saints, John Henry Newman, a “doctor” of the church.
He hasn’t granted any sitdown, tell-all interviews or made headline-grabbing, off-the-cuff comments like his predecessor did. He hasn’t made any major appointments, including to fill his old job, or taken any big trips.
In marking the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki last week, he had a chance to match Francis’ novel declaration that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was “immoral.” But he didn’t.
Leo — who hails from Chicago, the first North American pope after the first South American one — eased into his new job slowly, deliberately and quietly, almost trying not to draw attention to himself.
At 69, he seems to know that he has time on his side, and that after Francis’ revolutionary papacy, the church might need a bit of a breather. One Vatican official who knows Leo said he expects his papacy to have the effect of a “calming rain” on the church.
Maria Isabel Ibarcena Cuarite, a Peruvian member of a Catholic charismatic group, said it was Leo’s quiet emphasis on church traditions, its sacraments and love of Christ that drew her and more than 1 million young people to Rome for a special Jubilee week this month.
Ibarcena said Francis confused young people like herself with his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and approval of blessings for same-sex couples. Such gestures went beyond what a pope was supposed to do and what the church taught, she thought. Leo, she said, emphasized that marriage is a sacrament between man and woman.
Still, Leo is very much a product of Francis’ papacy. Francis named Prevost bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, in 2014 and then moved him to head one of the most important Vatican jobs — vetting bishop nominations — in 2023.
Augustinian pope
Leo insisted he is first and fore-most a “son of St. Augustine,” a reference to the 5th century theological and devotional giant of early Christianity, St. Augustine of Hippo, who inspired the 13th century religious Augustinian order as a community of “mendicant” friars.
Like the other big mendicant orders of the early church — the Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites — the Augustinians spread across Christian Europe over the centuries. Today, Augustinian spirituality is rooted in a deep interior life of prayer, living in community, and journeying together in search of truth in God.
In nearly every speech or homily since his election, Leo cited Augustine in one way or another.
He joined the Augustinians after graduating from Augustinian-run Villanova, outside Philadelphia, and was twice elected its prior general. He’s visited the Augustinian headquarters outside St. Peter’s a few times since his election.
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