The recent announcement in May that the Catholic cardinals, not a new baseball team at The Catholic University of America, but those cardinals selected to elect the next pope chose an American born prelate from the nation’s third largest city, Chicago, came as a shock to many observers, and those gathered in St. Peter’s Square, after hearing the announcement, turned to each other asking, “Who?”
Well that question was answered in the affirmative as Robert Francis Prevost, a 69 year old prelate who spent most of his leadership in Peru, but was a protege of the late Pope Francis, sharing most of his causes: care for immigrants, and migrants, care for the poor and those less fortunate in a global society, neatly clicked into place.
Prevost was the ultimate insider in the last remaining autocracy of the Western world, and was tasked with oversight of the selection of Catholic bishops, definitely not the humble parish priest of novels, but more of a kingmaker quietly ordering the pieces on the chessboard of ascendancy.
His American birth, while a shocker, is also key to not only the foci of Pope Francis, but also by extension a shift in the Vatican’s geopolitical worldview, one that had broad outlines from the late pontiff and whose worldview could only have an American as his successor.
Of course, there will be other interpretations attributing a stronger resume, relatively controversy free, etc. but all papal elections are unabashedly political, so the choice of an American seems deliberate.
As the US enters a new phase with the Trump administration, or Trump 2.0 as some in the media have coined it, many of the issues that have been centermost in both his campaign, and presidency, are now under an international microscope, and among them are issues close not only to Prevost’s ministry, but his heart; and, first and foremost the deportation of migrants and the treatment of immigrants, and images of international students in the US, being taken away in handcuffs, was certainly seen by him; and, in the past Prevost has remarked on these images with great concern, and even anger in social media.
According to CBS News, his most recent post was this: “in April, shared [a] commentary from a Catholic writer on Mr. Trump's meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. The post called the deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador "illicit" and asked: "Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?"
Certainly, the late Pope Francis had similar concerns and when Catholic convert, Vice President JD Vance, misinterpreted St. Augustine, ordo amoris in an online braggadocio with former UK minister Rory Stewart saying that the famed Christian theologian put concern for others at the bottom of humanitarian concerns, and Francis hit back, forcefully, with a rebuttal in a letter to US Bishops, saying: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other people and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!”
Concerns about the role of women in the Catholic church, and especially its traditional handmaidens, religious sisters, the nuns, (a source of unpaid labor), has become problematic to earlier pontificates, such as that of Benedict XVI, who had American nuns investigated for doctrinal purity.
The battle for some women to become ordained ministers has been fought for decades, especially in Chicago, a hotspot for women's ordination in the 1980s; and, one where Catholic women publicly protested vehemently for their ordination rights. will now be examined in a new light, with this change of leadership.
A battle royal might ensue as Prevost is firmly against ordaining women and said, in 2023, to a group of journalists, "Something that needs to be said also is that ordaining women — and there's been some women that have said this interestingly enough — 'clericalizing women' doesn't necessarily solve a problem, it might make a new problem."
LGBT Catholics desperate for full recognition, and acceptance, thought that they had it, with Francis but as theologian Mary Hunt noted,”Francis proved that the most important role for a pope is as a symbol of unity, not a figure of authority”, writing at Religion Dispatches, and while he was hospitalized the “wheels of the Vatican continued to turn . . . and “disgracefully, many Catholic women, LGBTQIA+ people and those abused by clergy continued to be marginalized.”
Leo will definitely have to deal with the pleas of LGBT Catholics and their families for full acceptance, and as an American, despite dual citizenship with Peru, he will be more than passingly familiar with gay Catholics, and their advocacy group Dignity.
While Leo’s predecessor met with transgendered people, it seems that he does not feel comfortable with that group, and has lumped them, broadly speaking, along with those aligned with new gender norms under the banner of “gender ideology,” a term that seems undefined, and, “According to the LGBTQ+ media advocacy group GLAAD, "gender ideology is not a term transgender people use to describe themselves, it is an inaccurate term deployed by opponents to undermine and dehumanize transgender and nonbinary people," according to the CBS report.
St. Lous University theologian Elizabeth Sweeny Block told USA Today that, “He has condemned so-called ‘gender ideology’ repeatedly - a deeply problematic and derogatory phrase and one without clear definition.”
Prevost has said in the past that, “it is confusing because it seems to create genders that don’t exist, So God created man and woman, and the attempt to confuse ideas from nature will only harm families and people,” when he was interviewed by a Peruvian newspaper.
American Catholic women are a force to be reckoned with, and their voices are sure to be heard in his pontificate. Leo may follow the path of Francis in his treatment of women, and it’s worth noting what Massimo Faggioli, an ecclesiologist at Villanova University, said about his trajectory: following two paths, one that was preserving the old order, “alongside clear messages about the need for a new pastoral praxis,” and notably was, “heavily shaped by his formation. He was more prone to talking about ‘woman’ than listening to women.”
Women religious have said that Prevost listens carefully when they speak, and while he helped Francis include them as leaders in his role of helping to select bishops, it’s easy enough to listen when he had no intention of including them as ordained ministers.
Race, America's most intractable problem, seems to have taken hold of him, and especially in light of traditional segregation in his native Chicago, he offered his prayers for George Floyd, and said, “We need to hear more from leaders in the church, to reject racism and seek justice.”
Only time will tell how, as pope, Prevost will act, both within and without the Catholic Church, but as not only the administrative head, but as a global moral leader, his words and actions will have profound effects both in America, and the world.
