What will it mean to have an Augustinian at the helm of the Catholic Church? A Church followed, on paper, by a billion and a half faithful, predominantly strong in what are increasingly becoming the world’s peripheries. Far from a West that seems to be fragmenting.
After the melancholic euphoria of applauding crowds, the media excitement first for the mourning – sudden yet to be expected – and then for the ever-fascinating suspense of the ritual, the secrecy of ancient liturgies that accompanied the most geopolitical conclave of the last two centuries, now the first meaningful appearances of Leo XIV are being measured and tested.
The lay people, sympathizers of the Jesuit pope, have lost his welcoming and empathetic attention. They are alarmed: for some, the Augustinian pope speaks too well of God, mortifying and excluding atheists (Who will save them? Are they part of the “damned mass” and therefore predestined to aeternam mortem?); others mourn the loss of the irreplaceable charismatic leader of the global Left, without considering that it is they who must seek out their Leftist leader.
The Augustinian pope will vividly recount sin and evil both of and in the world. He will speak of nature and Grace. Very likely. And he will do so through action and prayer.
There is widespread belief that Pope Leo XIV will have a different style from Pope Francis; he will carry forward, in an orderly way, the disordered processes initiated by his predecessor. He will do so without ostentation, with moderation. Without grand symbolic gestures, with discretion, with the reassurance typical of a non-divisive Augustinian.
How much discontinuity will there be as compared with Bergoglio’s anti-Westernism?
Before the conclave, we wondered whether, among the discontinuities with Bergoglio’s pontificate, there would be less hostility towards the West from his successor. The formerly deeply Catholic Ireland and Austria were not represented in the Sistine Chapel, in favor of Thailand, Myanmar, and many even more far-flung places. Paris, London, Venice, and especially Milan – where the great Giovanni Battista Montini once served when it was the most important diocese in the world – did not have an elector cardinal.
It was not just about understanding whether the new pope would be Italian or “global,” progressive or conservative, according to the by now exhausted categories of the twentieth century. Rather, it was about grasping how he would face a West that is no longer singular, that is irreversibly different from the one of our youth. And how he would position himself in relation to that Europe that Bergoglio literally described as abstract, arid, nihilistic.
The treatment of harsh coldness that he reserved for France remains emblematic. The “eldest daughter of the Church,” according to the title granted to her by King Clovis, was never visited by Pope Bergoglio—not even for the inauguration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, the symbol of European Christianity.
Europe in his predecessors
For the Polish Pope Wojtyla, still an expression of the post-World War II culture (which Pope Leo alluded to in the Regina Caeli on Sunday), Europe’s centrality was linked to an anti-communist stance. Europe needed to rediscover its Judeo-Christian roots and breathe with two lungs – the Western one and, no less importantly, the Eastern one, including Russia (when the two still seemed possible).
According to Ratzinger, the culture of relativism, non-negotiable values, and major anthropological changes should have rallied even the laity into a united front for the defense of a common humanism. On this point, the debate between Benedict XVI and Habermas remains unforgettable. For both, the encounter between faith and reason was not meant to occur in the name of a bland dialogue, but should have fed and nurtured each other reciprocally.
Bergoglio did not belong to the history of his predecessors. He did not ask, in the same way, what had become of those roots, of that humanism dissolved in the post-human, in the absolutization of technology, in the dogmatization of science. He did not philosophically question whether we are at the “last man” that Fukuyama spoke of, or within trans-humanism and post-humanism. Rather, he felt in his own flesh the consequences of this anthropological crisis, starting with the world’s poor.
Can the Christian West still awaken within creative minorities and popular piety?
Prophetically invoked by Ratzinger, the creative minorities: the significant growth of religious marriages in that French land, parched by wokism and an abstract laïcité; the desire for motherhood among women, hindered by material difficulties and the attacks of gender mainstream even on their identity; the need for relationships among young people who resist the alienating individualism of social media.
The need for spirituality and transcendence is a powerful signal, often channelled into irrational and sometimes dangerous forms – just think of the sects in the Americas.
His program lies behind the choice of the name Leo
With Prevost, attention to the “signs of the times” returns – the same attention that Leo XIII had, the pope who interpreted the epochal transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
That pope moved beyond the Church’s intransigent stance against the modernity brought by the French Revolution. A modernity that forced the Church into a secondary role in society, politics, and the State, effectively expelling it. The non expedit in Italy and the Kulturkampf in Germany.
It was an internal reckoning within Christianitas, much like after the French Revolution, between the intransigents who shut themselves off from modernity, and those who chose engagement instead. From De Maistre to La Mennais.
Well, things changed with the advent of Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius IX – still a pope-king reigning over the temporal State of the Church.
Akin to that Pope Leo, the current Pope Leo finds himself leading in an era of great change and within the context of a new industrial revolution, linked, in his own words, “to the developments of artificial intelligence, which bring new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labor.”
At the end of the nineteenth century, amid the first great Industrial Revolution – with new actors like the working class, capitalism, and socialism – Leo XIII laid the foundations of the Church’s social doctrine with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum: the third way between rampant capitalism with the exploitation of workers and class struggle with the abolition of private property.
“Among the new things was the divitiarum in exiguo numero affluentia, in multitudine inopia: the accumulation of wealth in a few hands and widespread poverty.”
With this, Giuseppe Toniolo, the ghost-writer of the Encyclical, described the globalization of the late 1800s. “Words that Leo XIV seems to share to describe the globalization of the 2000s,” as Giovanni Cominelli aptly wrote on May 13 in Italia Oggi.
This is how the foundations were laid for Catholic associations, unions, and white cooperatives. What today would be called the “third sector,” which – like the family, first and foremost, and small communities – are key places of Christian identity and action.
On the surface, it aligns with what Vance says about Augustine’s Ordo amoris (to love first those who are closest), but for Leo XIV, this does not contradict the closeness and the welcome extended to those farther away, like migrants and other peoples. In fact, quite the opposite.
The geopolitical novelties. China and Israel
On the geopolitical front, the relationship with China seems to be the most shadowed aspect in these early days of the pontificate, following the failed election to the papal throne of Secretary of State Pietro Parolin.
Parolin was not always fully appreciated by Bergoglio, although the latter fully supported his diplomatic work toward Beijing. “Asia is the future of the Church,” Pope Francis often told Cardinal Tagle, another favorite in the conclave.
It seems quite convincing that this shift in votes happened in exchange for reassurance that Asia and China would still be central to the new pontificate’s focus. All of this starts with a revival of the rather neglected Vatican diplomacy, which had a glorious history yet was sidelined by Bergoglio, who preferred to act directly even in geopolitics.
Parolin, who in this perspective could see his role as Secretary of State preserved and enhanced, comes from the noble and prestigious tradition of Cardinals Agostino Casaroli and Achille Silvestrini. The famous diplomacy of Vatican Ostpolitik toward the Soviet Union indeed bore remarkable fruits in the Helsinki Accords (1975), where religious freedom and freedom of thought were recognized as human rights – agreements signed even by the Soviet Union.
The difficult relationship with China, despite the obvious differences in the historical context, is not so dissimilar from the Ostpolitik strategy toward Communist Russia.
And finally, the relationship with Israel – perhaps the one that has deteriorated most of all.
The absence of a representative from Netanyahu’s government at Bergoglio’s funeral was a negative signal for what was presented as the most geopolitical funeral of all the pontificates of the twentieth century. Yet, among the very first signs of discontinuity, there is an initial easing of tensions.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog will be present on Sunday, May 18, at the enthronement ceremony, along with two hundred delegations from all over the world. Leo XIV personally invited Noemi Di Segni, the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, and Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni. A similar message was sent to Noam Marans, the director of the American Jewish Committee, one of the oldest American Jewish organizations:
“Trusting in the assistance of the Almighty” (a reassurance for traditionalists, Editor’s note), “I commit to continuing” (to dispel the notion of Bergoglio’s alleged antisemitism, Author’s note) “and strengthening the dialogue” (so we will do more, Author’s note) “with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Nostra Aetate declaration” (to unequivocally position himself in the path of Vatican II, Author’s note).
It was also noteworthy that during the Regina Caeli on Sunday, May 11, he defended Ukraine with absolute clarity and expressed solidarity with the Palestinians against the massacres perpetrated by Netanyahu’s government.
Some final observations touch on the isolation and weakness of the Italian Church, which also drags Europe down, and vice versa: the provincialism and irrelevance of Vatican diplomacy after the great Casaroli-Silvestrini era (astonishingly, no one mentioned this amid the media overdose of recent weeks).
The Italians cancelled each other out (as has been the case in all the recent conclaves, starting from Wojtyla’s). Including those belonging to the same “faction.”
Cover photo: Messages are written on a banner with an image of Pope Leo XIV at the Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo Catholic University in Chiclayo, Lambayeque region, northern Peru, on May 12, 2025. The world is still getting to know the modest and soft-spoken pontiff born in Chicago, who spent much of his life in the priesthood as a missionary in Peru, where he holds a second citizenship. (Photo by Ernesto BENAVIDES / AFP)
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