IN THE fortnight since Pope Leo XIV first greeted the world from the loggia of St Peter’s Basilica, journalists have been scurrying to find out more about him, through people who encountered him at various points of his life and ministry. The more serious have moved beyond celebrity headlines, and taken to analysing his pontificate’s likely direction and impact on world politics.
All of this is undoubtedly important. But what will the election of Robert Francis Prevost, the first native English-speaker to hold the post since Adrian IV in the 12th century, mean for society and culture, faith and spirituality, across the traditionally Protestant and secularised English-speaking world?
Pope Leo has, so far, been careful to speak mainly in Italian and Latin rather than English — recognising the papacy’s rootedness in Rome, and, perhaps, political sensitivities as well. On 21 May, however, he led part of his general audience in English, reflecting on the parable of the Sower and drawing enthusiastic applause while greeting pilgrims from the United States and other English-speaking countries.
For all the talk of his love for jazz and baseball, the Vatican has played down his US connections in favour of his work in Latin America and his leadership of the worldwide Augustinian order. Some commentators have already dubbed Leo XIV a rather un-American American.
YET the advent of a pope who thinks and speaks in English could also have enormous potential.
English-speaking countries, led by the United States, still dominate the world — in diplomacy and communication, media, arts, and culture. All have also inherited a post-Reformation outlook, which underpins their politics, institutions, social structures, and ways of thinking.
In Britain, the US, and the present-day Commonwealth, most Roman Catholic dioceses were founded only in the 19th and 20th centuries, to serve communities excluded and marginalised until living memory. Even as English became the modern world’s lingua franca, the Church’s cultural framework remained predominantly Italian, French, and Spanish, with input from German and Polish.
In local contexts, this has been quietly changing. Guidebooks to Oxford still state, bluntly, that there were “three Oxford martyrs”: the ill-fated Protestants Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer. Yet the university, which barred Roman Catholics until the late 19th century, has also produced 15 saints and 57 beatified Catholics. It now has a resident Cardinal, the renowned Dominican Fr Timothy Radcliffe, and a significant Catholic “influencer” in the figure of St John Henry Newman.
Such changing realities need proper acknowledgment if the evangelistic opportunities offered by an English-speaking pope are to be made use of.
At the time of writing, Leo XIV has addressed other Churches only in general terms. Yet his openness, drawing on the common heritage of St Augustine, has been made clear in his repeated emphasis on peace and unity, dialogue and reconciliation.
At his inaugural mass (News, 23 May), he spoke of his Church as “a small leaven of unity, communion, and fraternity”, following a common path “with our sister Christian Churches”, and seeking “that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people”.
Speaking this month to the Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice, which promotes Catholic social teaching, he defended critical thinking, and condemned any immoral “indoctrination” that undermines “the sacred freedom of respect for conscience”.
The RC Church’s social doctrine did not claim “a monopoly on truth”, Pope Leo continued. It sought, instead, “to confront problems; for these are always different”, and to tackle “challenges, dreams, and questions”, using “language intelligible to every generation”.
The Pope reiterated that challenge in a message to representatives of denominations and faiths attending his inauguration, and paid tribute to the “openings and initiatives” undertaken by the late Pope Francis in his “ecumenical journey”, as well as his all-important cultivation of personal relationships with other religious leaders.
On the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (News, 15 November 2024), Pope Leo recommitted himself to seeking “the re-establishment of full and visible communion” with other Churches, and to developing “new and concrete forms for an ever more intense synodality in the ecumenical field”.
LEO XIV will certainly maintain Pope Francis’s momentum of reform and progress, including his commitment to social justice, and his missionary and pastoral openness to excluded groups.
As a canon lawyer and a seasoned administrator, however, he will also give it structure and consistency, and keep liberal and conservative forces in place by ensuring that it gains coherent meaning and direction. All of this will have profound implications for ecumenical co-operation.
When I attended Leo XIV’s Vatican meeting with media representatives on 12 May, he provoked applause by urging them to “safeguard the precious gift of free speech”, while resisting mediocrity, stereotypes, and clichés (News, 16 May).
He also began with a joke, in his American-accented English, that the applause that greeted his arrival would count only if his listeners were still awake at the end.
With its self-effacing irony, it was a very English gag — a reminder that Chicago-born Bob Prevost, 267th successor to St Peter, will, indeed, be speaking in images and idioms that we understand — as the first modern pope raised and trained after the Second Vatican Council, and the first from the turbulent, fractious, but ever vibrant Anglosphere.
Jonathan Luxmoore is a freelance journalist.
