Rome has its new Bishop; beyond the externals and charm of centuries-old procedures that have attracted so many tourists to the churchyard of St. Peter, it would be more appropriate to take the viewpoint that privileges time in the face of inconsistent social platforms. Acting in the name and on behalf of God, beyond the easy Blues Brothers-style irony, gives the Church incomparable power. Therefore, it is better to leave aside current events and their forms to try to understand men who move along the lines of history according to millenary logics that project into the future, right or wrong as they may appear.
Attempting to make predictions is impossible, just as it is useless to try to give political connotations that point to the everyday when the Church, by its very nature, directs, or at least should do so, towards overcoming time.
It took 249 years for the US to produce a pontiff, embodying what could be superficially interpreted as an anomaly for a country that is naturally hegemonic in many fields. How can we tolerate, after Patton or Eisenhower, even a pope?
Cardinal Francis George has astutely observed that, until America is in political decline, we will not see an American pope; after the Chinese rise we have really arrived there. For this reason, perhaps, Cardinal Prevost1, was elected; perceived politically as a centrist, Prevost has shown progressive openings on several social issues.
Secondo The College of Cardinals Report, Prevost would be close to Bergoglian perspectives on the issue of the poor and migrants, but apparently less inclined to seek the favor of the LGBTQ lobby. In any case, an American pope who chooses the name of Leo XIV, addressing the pontiff who authored the rerum Novarum as well as a model for facing the world in a multipolar version, as much as it can be a link with the Atlantic West, as it can propose itself as a political problem for Trump, with whom there are no direct relations and who, according to some media, donated 14 million dollars to the depleted Vatican coffers, which are in deficit of 70 million euros.
Despite the speculation, Pope Prevost criticized Vice President Vance, highlighting significant differences with one of the main American political exponents; a position interpreted as a sign of independence capable of reducing any hypothesis of an ideological alliance between Pope Leo and Donald Trump.
It is inevitable to return with our thoughts to the photomontage that portrayed the American president in papal robes; a game that, more than to the questionable taste, recalled political visions of rare crudeness, caught off guard by a politically subtle college of cardinals, who were not influenced by social stupidity and who were able to valorize the dual citizenship, American and Peruvian, of the newly elected.
According to Father Falcone, an Augustinian brother, the new pontiff is a dignified man of the center able to keep together the different sensibilities of the Church, also strong in the fact that he built his ecclesiastical missionary career far from a mother country prone to polarizations of every possible dynamic and characterized by deep divisions between fervent conservatism and more progressive visions.
But be careful about associating the doctrine of the Church with contingent political positions: the Vatican, as we have said, travels on different tracks and at different speeds. Leo XIV, the least American among Americans, is characterized by sobriety, attention to doctrine and respect for the liturgy., although he has never aligned himself with more traditionalist currents; this has not prevented him from criticizing Western media as sources of influence on Catholic culture, nor from defining gender ideology as creator of confusion. Seen as less ideological ma curial for the role he held, he was still considered an acceptable actor within conservative circles, capable of combining internationalism, doctrinal moderation, government experience and personal prudence.
If it is true that the name chosen by the pontiff reveals his spirit and vision, Leo is a challenging name, given that it is from his predecessors that one can intuit his pastoral and political orientation, marked by the ability to connect North America, without being conditioned by it, and the Peruvian global south, where the pope served as a missionary, projecting a solid leadership image capable of challenging geopolitical tensions, as already happened with the Leoni of the past.
Leo XIV can be the pope of balance, of mediation in moments of crisis and fragmentation like the current one, a time not yet ready for the polarizations proposed by Bergoglio. Prevost was the best possible outsider, able to obtain transversal consensus, surpass more famous candidates, prepare for epochal challenges by bringing the symbolism of the lion to courageous concreteness.
Prevost belongs to an order that harks back to a Saint, Augustine, who shaped Christian doctrine and spirituality, placing himself as a link between a declining empire and a Europe to be united, exalting, once again, the vision of a Church capable of going beyond history. Perhaps Leo is truly the best name that, now, a pope could choose; God bless you, Leo!
1 He studied theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and studied canon law in Rome at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
