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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is author of ‘Hitler’s Pope’, ‘The Pontiff in Winter’ and ‘Earth to Earth’
What was he thinking? Leo XIV! A tribute clearly to Leo XIII, pope from 1878 to 1903, a major pin-up boy for Catholics through the first half of the 20th century. As a Catholic schoolboy in the 1950s, I learnt by heart whole chunks of Leo’s celebrated encyclical, Rerum Novarum — Of New Things.
That papal letter to the world insisted on the rights and dignity of workers, a living wage, even the right to strike, while condemning socialism and capitalist greed in equal measure. It has been the foundation of Catholic teaching on “the common good” to this day.
The name Leo indicates the new pope’s focus on the plight of working people worldwide. But few expected the cardinals to choose an American pope, born and raised in Chicago.
Evidently, and with ample justification, they see the Church in the US as the great coal face: a huge Catholic community in deep crisis. While more than 40 per cent of the Church resides in Latin America, the Church in the US, at 7 per cent of the whole Church, numbers over 50mn adults. Catholicism without the heft of North America’s faithful is unthinkable.
Yet the comparatively large size of US Catholic affiliation by baptism doesn’t mean all is well. According to a Gallup poll only 23 per cent of Catholics attend weekly Mass. Some 19 per cent of Americans self-identify as Catholic, down from 24 per cent in 2007. Meanwhile, in a survey conducted by the Catholic magazine Crisis, for every 100 people currently joining the Catholic Church in the US, 840 are leaving. If half true, even, the trend is catastrophic.
Catholic communities are split. The traditionalists yearn for adherence to old liturgies and condemnation of divorce, abortion and homosexuality.
So-called “big tent” Catholics, the progressive wing of the US Church, counsel humanistic sympathy for the way people actually live, a tendency Pope Francis espoused. And amid the widespread woes of American Catholicism there has been a reduction in donations to the Church, exacerbating a deficit in the Vatican’s finances.
The 19th-century convert Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote an influential essay, the “Grammar of Assent”. He argued that it was through a holistic experience of traditions, writings, liturgies and ministers that people were drawn to a religion.
The stunning effect of the clerical abuse scandal in America, reinforced by the media and movies such as Spotlight reveal that by the same token a big “yes” to a faith can become a big “no”. Already an ominous cloud on the dawn of Leo’s papacy is the claim by three Peruvian women that as bishop he failed to investigate their reports of abuse by two priests in Chiclayo, Peru, dating back to 2007.
The cardinals nevertheless believed that a pope speaking to American Catholics in an American accent, backed by pontifical authority, could turn the American Catholic ship around to the benefit of the entire Church.
Certainly Leo will show who calls the doctrinal shots. Fully one-third of Trump’s cabinet are Catholics of a distinctly traditionalist hue — the most outspoken being vice-president JD Vance, who converted in 2019.
Vance recently tried to assume the mantle of scriptural exegete to pronounce that Jesus taught us to put our nearest and dearest before neighbours and strangers. The vice-president instructed Americans to quit being charitable to illegal migrants. It was then cardinal Robert Prevost who instantly posted on X that Vance had got it all “wrong”.
Yet it is not all about the US. On the world stage Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping may see an American pope as the “chaplain” of the “west”, confirming the Vatican as the spiritual representative of their enemies.
But a closer look at his career and record locates him squarely in the global south. Leo spent a decade working as a missionary in Peru among indigenous people. He has acquired Peruvian citizenship and Latin America’s faithful see him as one of their own.
He will continue Francis’s outreach to the faithful of the developing world, while being authentically American born and bred. An apparent reconciliation of incompatibles, he is an inspired choice and his compatriots are ecstatic: “We are floored, stunned and full of hope,” says Archbishop-designate Shawn McKnight of Kansas City — the last prelate appointed by Francis.
Leo’s opening speech from the balcony spoke of peace, and peacemaking: if he can employ his evident skills in reconciling incompatibles to aid prospects in the Middle East and Ukraine, the cardinals will have chosen well.
