For the first time in the history of the 2,000-year old Roman Catholic Church, a U.S.-born pope will lead its 1.4 billion members worldwide. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a sixty-nine-year-old originally from the Chicago area, was elected by the largest conclave of cardinals ever—133 prelates from more than seventy countries—to choose the the 267th pope whom Catholics view as the successor to Saint Peter. Most cardinals who voted had been appointed by the late Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America, who reached out to the “peripheries” of the globe to diversify the powerful pope-electing group from its traditional European and American makeup.
In his first major decision, Prevost took the name Leo XIV. The chosen name of a Supreme Pontiff is considered by Catholics to signal the new pope’s vision and what is important to him. The last pope named Leo, who reigned from 1878 to 1903, strove to position the Church in a quickly modernizing world. In 1891, Leo XIII wrote the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things)—a letter sent to all the bishops of the Catholic Church at that time—which championed the dignity of workers and the poor and from which today’s body of Catholic social doctrine descends. The encyclical rejected both socialism and unfettered capitalism, and called for fair wages and the right of workers to form unions.
Despite his U.S. roots and his undergraduate years studying mathematics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, Leo XIV could also be considered the second Latin American pope after Francis, having spent decades as a missionary with the Augustinian order and later a bishop in Peru. Like other well-known missionary migrants to Latin America, including the Spanish Jesuits who were martyred in El Salvador in 1989, he became a naturalized citizen of the country where he lived and worked and has held citizenship in Peru since 2015.
“He is so close to us,” says Aldo Panfichi, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, in a telephone interview from Lima shortly after the new pontiff appeared on the central balcony in St. Peter’s Square. “For us he’s Latin American.”
Edgar Beltrán/The Pillar
Newly elected Pope Leo XIV speaks to the crowd from the Loggia of Blessings on the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City, May 8, 2025.
But Prevost is more experienced in the ways of the Vatican than Francis was in 2013 at the beginning of his term, having already served in Rome, most recently as the Prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops, the key department in charge of researching and appointing bishops worldwide. There, he helped to carry out Francis’s initiative to name more women to important positions in the Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the Church—though like his predecessor, he is firmly opposed to allowing women to be ordained.
The fact that Prevost was elected relatively quickly—on the second day and fourth ballot of the conclave—suggests a critical mass of support from other high ranking clergy, which could help him at the beginning of his pontificate. His invocation of Francis at the beginning of his first speech as Pope Leo XIV appeared to come from the heart, and he was known as being close to the late pope.
While the conclave’s deliberations are kept strictly secret, it has long been rumored that the cardinal electors in the past have shied away from voting for candidates from the United States due to its far-reaching global power, and concerns about undue influence on the Church from Washington, D.C.. As far back as 1899, Pope Leo XIII voiced suspicion that what he called “Americanism”—the individualism and can-do attitude that was becoming part of the country’s character—might take priority over certain aspects of church doctrine, leading to an American Catholic practice that placed greater emphasis on hard work and interior spirituality than the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. When Robert Prevost’s name came up in the pre-conclave list of “papabiles”—potential candidates for pope—commentators often qualified him as “the least American of the Americans.”
In recent years, however, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been markedly more conservative and traditionalist than those of other countries. When the group tried to forbid Holy Communion to newly elected President Joe Biden in 2021 for supporting abortion laws, Francis’s Vatican stopped them. Abortion, the Argentine Jesuit maintained, was no more “pre-eminent,” than other pro-life issues such as capital punishment or care for the poor. Francis said he had “never denied the Eucharist to anyone.” Most U.S. bishops largely ignored Pope Francis’s landmark 2015 encyclical on care for the earth, Laudato Si’, which condemned the economic inequity that harms the poor and most vulnerable, and which urged disinvestment from fossil fuels. Prevost, who was working in Peru and the Vatican, did not belong to the U.S. Conference of Bishops.
But while many progressive Catholics are celebrating Pope Leo’s election, the U.S. Catholic traditionalist movement is angling to increase its influence, as well. Coincident with the conclave, some of the wealthy lay supporters of the most conservative U.S. bishops attended pre-scheduled events in Rome where they wined and dined with European Catholic ultra-traditionalists. There, they shared fundraising techniques for goals such as larger families, as well as ways to combat increasingly positive attitudes toward same-sex couples and the expanding roles for women in the Church. Brian Burch, who will serve as President Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican pending a final Senate confirmation vote, is a prominent figure in conservative Catholic advocacy circles, having previously supported Trump’s campaigns through his work as founder and president of a lobbying organization called CatholicVote.
The U.S. bishops’ conference will now have to compete with a variety of factions from many countries for the new pope’s ear. Prevost’s first words to the world as Pope Leo XIV emphasized peace as a central desire, as well as inclusiveness, with openness “to all, to all.” His more detailed statement of policy, or vision of his pontificate, is likely to emerge in coming weeks. He may enjoy a honeymoon period with public goodwill at first, riding the memory of Francis, who was cherished by many. Soon, however, he will be expected to act on persistent issues such as priestly celibacy, priestly ordination for women, and the sex abuse crisis within the Church. Prevost has already been recognized for calling out Trump’s treatment of immigrants. In a speech in 2012, he condemned what he termed the “homosexual lifestyle” as being “at odds with the Gospel.” While these statements are making some LGBTQ+ Catholics nervous, he has also been a supporter of Pope Francis’s emphasis on synodality, the process of listening to all, including lay people, about the important directions of the church.
Panfichi, who worked with Prevost and others on university issues in Peru, including the new pope’s desire to keep education available to low-income students, visited with him privately in Rome in September. He noted Prevost’s approachable manner: “He speaks horizontally, as if comfortable with informality.”
Before that meeting ended, Prevost mentioned how he liked the food of the Peruvian Chiclayo region where he had been, mentioning rice with duck, and said he looked forward to attending the region’s annual festivities later this year.
“I guess he’ll have to postpone that now,” Panfichi said.
Inevitably, the new Pope Leo XIV will be compared less to the former Leo XIII and more to Francis, who looms larger in recent memory. In an interview on the Vatican website last year, Prevost said, “The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom” but to “be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them.”