Born in 1948, I have now lived through eight pontificates: Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis — and now Leo. Each name carries its own theological tonality, its own historical signature, its own particular gift to the Church and to the world. And each, I have always believed and church history bears out, was given to us not by sociological inevitability but by the providence of the Holy Spirit, who has a way of giving the Church the right Pope at the right time for the times in which we are living.
That conviction has been tested often enough over the course of seventy-odd years. But it has rarely felt as luminous as it does on this first anniversary of the election of Pope Leo XIV.
Three of the early major biographies have crossed my desk during these past twelve months — Elise Allen’s Pope Leo XIV: The Biography, Christopher White’s Pope Leo XIV, and Christopher Lamb’s American Hope: What Pope Leo XIV Means for the Church and the World. Read together, they yield a remarkably convergent portrait. The themes that emerge are not the construction of any single author but the shared witness of journalists who have followed the man closely. Those themes have stayed with me, and they are worth pondering on this anniversary.
A Man of the Council
Robert Francis Prevost was formed not in the seminary world of the 1950s but in the post-conciliar ferment of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. CTU was, and remains, a different kind of school. His classmates included men from many religious congregations, lay students pursuing degrees in theology, and women, religious and lay— both as fellow students and as professors of theology and Scripture. His formation was conciliar from the inside out: not Vatican II as something to be defended from some prior, more secure orthodoxy, but Vatican II as the very air he breathed and the grammar in which he learned to think the faith.
This matters more than it may at first appear. A pope formed at CTU in those years internalized Lumen Gentium‘s ecclesiology of the People of God, Sacrosanctum Concilium‘s vision of participatio actuosa, (active participation) and Gaudium et Spes‘s pastoral engagement with the modern world not as items in a catalogue to be selectively retrieved but as the constitutive shape of his priestly imagination. Those who hoped the conclave might somehow restore a pre-conciliar tableau have, in this respect at least, received their answer.
His subsequent postgraduate studies only deepened that conciliar instinct. He earned his doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas — the Angelicum — in Rome, defending his dissertation in 1987, four years after the promulgation of the revised Code, on the office and authority of the local prior in the Order of St. Augustine. And yet — this is the part that matters — unlike some bishops who hold comparable degrees and have made of canon law a wall behind which to defend a perceived orthodoxy from those they presume not to share it, Leo never forgot the principle the Code itself enshrines as its very last word, in canon 1752: salus animarum suprema lex — the salvation of souls is the supreme law of the Church. For him canon law is what it ought always to be: a pastoral instrument in the service of the care of souls, never an end in itself, and never a weapon.
A Son of Augustine
Friendship, for Augustine, is not the veneer of the Christian life but very nearly its substance. The Confessions and De Civitate Dei alike are written out of the deep conviction that we are made for communion — first with God, and through God with one another. To be a son of Augustine, as Pope Leo is in the most literal sense — an Augustinian friar of the Order of St. Augustine — is to inherit a theology in which community grounded in friendship is not a pastoral strategy but a sacramental reality.
This is why his first words from the loggia of St. Peter’s struck so many of us with such quiet force. Echoing Augustine’s Sermon 340 — Vobis sum episcopus, vobiscum christianus — he reminded the universal Church that for us he is a bishop, but with us he is a Christian. The episcopal office is a service rendered from within the communion of the baptized, never a height from which one descends to bestow. That single sentence, recovered from a North African pulpit at the turn of the fifth century, may turn out to be the hermeneutical key to this entire pontificate.
A Missionary with the Smell of the Sheep
Long before he was Bishop of Chiclayo, and long before Francis brought him to Rome as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Robert Prevost was a missionary in Peru. Two decades of accompanying ordinary Catholic life in the parishes and small communities of northern Peru — celebrating Mass in Spanish, walking with the poor, learning the textures of a Latin American Catholicism whose vitality has no patience for North Atlantic culture-war fixations — shaped him in ways no curial assignment could have approximated.
Francis used to speak of the shepherds who carry the smell of the sheep. The phrase is not pious sentimentality. It is a description of pastoral integrity. A bishop who has not been close enough to his people to absorb their odors is a bishop who has not been close enough to know them. Pope Leo carries that fragrance — and he carries it in a way that complicates every easy narrative about the “first American pope,” because the formation that matters most to him was given to him not in Chicago or in Rome but in Chiclayo.
And in carrying that fragrance, he reminds the rest of us — clerical and lay, contemplative and active — that we are all missionaries at heart. The Church does not so much have a mission as the mission has a Church.
The Heart of Francis, His Own Voice
It has been observed often enough during this first year that Pope Leo carries forward the mind and heart of Francis. He does. He has not undone, and has shown no inclination to undo, the synodal trajectory, the missionary outward turn, or the preferential option for the poor and the migrant that defined the Bergoglian pontificate.
But he is not Francis redivivus, and it is a disservice to both men to read him that way. His temperament is more measured, his speech more deliberate, his administrative instincts more consultative. Where Francis often governed by gesture and prophetic provocation, Leo governs by patient consultation and steady doctrinal clarity. The continuity is real and substantial. So is the distinctiveness. Once again the Holy Spirit gives the right pope at the right time — and the time after Francis required precisely this combination.
A Synodal Listener
The most demanding and the least understood word of these years is synodality. It does not mean parliamentary procedure dressed in liturgical vesture. It means a Church that listens before it speaks, that walks together before it pronounces, that recognizes — as the early Church recognized — that the Spirit speaks through the whole of the baptized faithful and not only through the magisterium considered narrowly.
There is an ancient principle at work here. The credibility of an ecclesia docens, a teaching Church, is measured precisely by its capacity to be also an ecclesia discens, a listening and learning Church. A Church that has lost the capacity to listen has nothing trustworthy left to teach. Synodality, in this sense, is not a programmatic novelty but the recovery of an apostolic instinct. It is listening as a form of love, accompaniment as a form of authority, consultation as the ordinary way one governs a communion rather than commands an institution.
Pope Leo has, across this first year, modeled that discipline in countless small and large ways: in his deliberate consultations before major appointments, in his measured silences when louder voices clamored for spectacle, in his refusal to weaponize the papal microphone for short-term advantage.
A Pope for a Digital Age
There is an additional dimension of this papacy that distinguishes Leo from every one of his predecessors and that deserves its own consideration on this anniversary. He is the first pope to have come of age, ministered, and governed in a thoroughly digital world — and the first to have personally inhabited that world rather than received reports about it from those who do.
His predecessors used technology mediated through staff. Leo uses it himself. He is comfortable with a computer and a mobile phone in a way no previous occupant of the See of Peter has been. Before his election he maintained an active presence on social media — on X and Instagram — engaging directly in public theological and political conversation, including the now widely-noted post correcting Vice President Vance’s misuse of Augustine’s ordo amoris. He has carried that fluency into his pontificate. He understands the medium from the inside, which is precisely why he understands its dangers from the inside as well.
This is no accident, and it bears directly on his choice of name. From his very first formal address to the College of Cardinals on May 10, 2025 — barely forty-eight hours after his election — he made the connection explicit. He had taken the name Leo, he said, in homage to Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum answered the upheavals of the first industrial revolution with a magisterial defense of human dignity, justice, and labor. The Church, he told the cardinals, must now offer that same treasury of social teaching in response to “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Two days later, in his address to the journalists who had covered the conclave, he returned to the theme: artificial intelligence carries “immense potential,” but that potential “requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity.” It was a quiet but unmistakable signal that AI would be a defining preoccupation of this pontificate. The signal has only intensified across this first year. He has spoken of AI to bishops, to tech executives gathered at the Vatican, to international parliamentarians, to educators, to children. As I write, Vatican sources have now confirmed that his first encyclical, provisionally titled Magnifica Humanitas, will be signed on May 15, 2026 — one week from this anniversary, and the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum itself. The encyclical will take up not only artificial intelligence but also the fragility of international law and the architecture of global peace, placing Leo XIV in a luminous May 15 lineage that runs from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), through Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), to John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961). Each in its turn brought the Catholic social tradition into engagement with a transformed world. Magnifica Humanitas will do the same with the world in which we now find ourselves.
What strikes me, though, is the texture of his engagement. He is not a Luddite, and he is not a technophile. He sees both the light and the shadow with unusual clarity precisely because he has walked in both. Social media, used well, is a genuine instrument of evangelization in a missionary Church — a way the Gospel can travel where no preacher can physically go, a way the Good News can be proclaimed in the languages and forms of a digitally native generation. He understands this. He has used it.
But he also understands its capacity to deform what it claims to serve. In his February 2026 dialogue with the priests of the Diocese of Rome, he warned his brother priests against two specific temptations: writing homilies with artificial intelligence, and chasing “likes” and “followers” on platforms like TikTok. “To give a true homily,” he said, “is to share faith” — and artificial intelligence “will never be able to share faith.” The image he reached for was almost Pauline: like all the muscles of the body, the intelligence and the spirit atrophy when they are not exercised. To outsource the homily to a machine is to abdicate the very thing one is ordained to do. To chase likes is to confuse witness with performance, the cross with the screen.
This is, I think, the deeper Augustinian instinct at work. Augustine knew that the human person is capax Dei — capable of God — and that nothing less than God satisfies the restless heart. To Leo’s eyes, the most serious danger of the digital and algorithmic age is not that machines will become persons but that persons will be tempted to become machines: optimized, automated, reduced to functions, deprived of the depth and mystery that makes a creature a creature. As he told the Italian bishops: “the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery.”
That is the voice we should expect to hear in Magnifica Humanitas. It is not the voice of a man afraid of his moment. It is the voice of a man who has lived inside it and has decided to speak the Gospel from within it.
The Most Un-American American Pope
Set aside, if we can, the absurd claim from President Trump — posted, characteristically, to Truth Social — that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The remark belongs to a category of public statements one no longer bothers to dignify with refutation. But it does offer an occasion to recall what Catholics actually believe about a papal conclave.
We do not believe the Holy Spirit hands the cardinals a name on a slip of paper. We believe the Spirit works through the fully human, often politically textured deliberation of the cardinal-electors gathered under oath inside the Sistine Chapel. Joseph Ratzinger, who knew the process from the inside as well as anyone of his generation, once cautioned against any mechanical understanding of the Spirit’s role — observing wryly that if the Spirit chose the pope in any direct sense, some of the popes history has given us would be rather difficult to account for. What the Spirit does, rather, is preside over and providentially shape an irreducibly human discernment. The cardinals can choose well or poorly, and history will judge. But the Catholic conviction has always been that, in a way more mysterious than coercive, the right pope is somehow given to the Church for the moment in which the Church finds herself.
I am persuaded that this is precisely what happened on May 8, 2025. At a moment when the United States has elected and now re-elected a man whose pathological narcissism shapes nearly every dimension of American public life — whose instinctive conflation of his own person with the office, with the nation, and even with the faith has reached proportions earlier generations would have found scarcely believable — the Holy Spirit has given the Church and the world a pope who is, in nearly every respect that matters, his moral and theological counter-image.
Leo is American. That is real and not to be minimized. He was born in Chicago, ordained for an American religious province, formed at an American theological union. There is a particular cadence to his English, an American directness in his manner, a recognizable American pragmatism in his way of governing. The “first American pope” headlines were not wrong.
And yet — and this is the deeper truth — he is in nearly every respect that matters the most un-American pope America could have produced. The formative decades of his priestly and episcopal life were spent not in the United States but in Peru, among the poor of Chiclayo and the surrounding country, in a Catholicism whose sensibilities have very little patience for the culture-war preoccupations of North Atlantic Catholicism and even less for the bizarre fusion of Christianity and nationalism that has overtaken much of American public Christianity in recent years. The very name he chose embeds him in a Catholic Social Teaching tradition that has always functioned as a check on the worst tendencies of American capitalism, American individualism, and American imperial confidence. The Augustinian theology of communion he carries stands at right angles to the rugged-individualist civic religion in which so many of his fellow Americans were catechized long before they ever encountered the Gospel.
Where the dominant strain of American public Christianity in this moment has chosen the City of Man and dressed it in the vestments of the City of God, Leo speaks from within the actual City of God and addresses the City of Man with the patient, unflinching clarity of one who has read his Augustine and believed him. Where America-First Catholicism has tried to bend the ordo amoris into a justification for closing borders and abandoning the migrant, Leo — even before his election — corrected the misreading in public. Where the present American moment offers a politics of grievance, of zero-sum domination, of the strong devouring the weak, Leo offers a Petrine ministry rooted in service, in friendship, in accompaniment, and in the preferential option for the poor.
And his American identity, for all that, remains a providential asset rather than a liability for his prophetic ministry. When Leo speaks truth to American power, he does not need a translator. He confronts the present moment with the unvarnished directness of a fellow American — one who knows the idiom from the inside, who understands precisely how to be heard in the American ear, who carries no foreign accent and no continental remoteness that would allow the easy dismissal well, he doesn’t really understand us. The administration’s predictable attempts to wave him off as out-of-touch with American realities have gained no traction whatsoever, precisely because everyone — including those attempting the dismissal — knows perfectly well that he is from Chicago.
My friend David Gibson made a kindred argument in Commonweal just days ago, in a piece bearing the brilliant title “Leo vs. the Americanists.” Gibson observes the historical irony that Leo XIII condemned “Americanism” as a phantom heresy in 1899, only to have the actual heresy emerge a century later — not in the assimilationist forms Leo XIII had feared, but in the form of an American Catholicism that has come to behave as a religious authority unto itself, instructing the pope of Rome to stick to morality and internal Church affairs and to stay out of both politics and theology proper. The instruction is not metaphorical. Vice President Vance, a 2019 convert to Catholicism, went so far as to warn Pope Leo to “be careful” when he “opines on matters of theology” — an admonition delivered, with no apparent sense of its absurdity, to the Bishop of Rome about the very thing his office exists to do.
Gibson’s pithiest expression of this dispossession is unforgettable: where William F. Buckley’s National Review once dismissed John XXIII’s social teaching with the slogan “Mater si, Magistra no” — mother yes, teacher no — the unspoken creed of much American Catholic conservatism in 2026, Gibson notes, has become “MAGA si, Magistra no.” That ecclesiological deformation is precisely the wound the present Leo’s pontificate is being asked to address. During his eleven-day African journey, undertaken in the very weeks the president was attacking him from Washington, Leo stood in a cathedral in war-scarred Bamenda, Cameroon, and told the people gathered there, “today you are the city on the hill, resplendent in the eyes of all.” The first American pope was quietly conferring on a Cameroonian congregation the foundational scriptural image John Winthrop had once applied to America itself.
In other words: he is precisely the American the Holy Spirit gave us at this hour — not the American the dominant culture would have predicted, and almost certainly not the American the dominant culture would have chosen, but the American the Church and the world were given at exactly the moment they most needed him. That, I am persuaded, is what providence looks like.
Speaking Gospel Truth to Power
And yet — and this is essential — he has not been silent when truth required speech.
“I am not fearful of President Trump.” The line was offered without bravado, almost as an aside, but it has lodged in the public memory. He has spoken plainly about the wars this country has initiated. He has reaffirmed and extended the magisterial rejection of capital punishment. He has refused to bless the conflation of the Gospel with American civil religion or with Christian-nationalist iconography.
He has done all of this, however, in love. There is no rancor in his witness, no settling of scores, no theatrical denunciation. There is only the steady speaking of Gospel truth in a moment when much of the public Christianity of this country has quietly decided that the Gospel can be traded for proximity to power.
That, too, is Augustinian. Augustine wrote De Civitate Dei in the wake of Rome’s collapse precisely to teach Christians not to confuse the City of God with any earthly city, however congenial. Leo, his son, has been giving us a master class in that distinction.
A Year, and Just the Beginning
We are one year in. A papacy is a long arc, and arcs of this length cannot be judged from their first turn. There will be controversies. There will be disappointments. There will be initiatives that succeed and others that do not. That is the nature of governing a Church of more than a billion souls in an age such as ours.
But the foundation has been laid, and it is recognizably the foundation of a pope formed by the Council, shaped by Augustine, seasoned by mission, joined to the heart of his predecessor, committed to listening, and unafraid to speak the truth in love through whatever means the present age provides. For those of us who continue to believe that the Holy Spirit gives the Church the right Pope at the right time, the evidence of this first year is, quite simply, consoling.
Ad multos annos, Holy Father. May your papacy be long. May we have the grace to walk it with you.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L., is a retired Catholic priest of the Diocese of Orange and retired rector of Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano.
With thanks to Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L., where this article originally appeared.
