A few days from Leo XIV’s papacy, the new Pope has begun to establish his vision of how the Catholic Church will direct.
Like their predecessor, he plans to hug the poor and marginalized. He wants to continue Francis’s effort to open the doors of the Vatican and listen to many voices outside the church hearchy. And in a clear sign that this is a Pope tune in with the greatest evidence of modernity, he said that the Church would address the challenge that artificial intelligence will represent for “human dignity, justice and work.”
As leader of about 1.4 billion followers, a population that is equal to the size of China or India, Pope Leo’s words matter to almost one in six people in the world. It also has a powerful global pulpit, so the problems in which you choose to concentrate can resonate far beyond the Catholic brothers.
Francisco’s energy, charisma and compassion reminded not only Catholics but also those of other religions and in the secular circles that a Pope can be a public voice in ethical life.
Francis assumed the mantle of the poor and migrants, as well as the urgent need to respond to climate change. He was a man of powerful gestures, such that he made his first official trip to Lampedusa, the small Mediterranean island where thousands of desperate asylum seekers and migrants sought to enter Europe, or visit the prisons to kiss at the feet of the inmates. Just before being admitted to the hospital in February, he taught about President Trump’s mass deportation policies, calling them a violation of the “dignity of younger men and women, and whole families.”
Leo takes care of the Papacy at a tumultuous moment in world affairs. Wars are getting rid of several fronts, the political sphere in many countries is polarized, economic inequality is increasing and people struggle to make basic human connections through a sea of misinformation and deviation in social networks.
“We are at a time when the moral forces of the world and the religious forces of the world have a deep responsibility to say that it cannot be done not,” said Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, a Protestant Minister and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policies in the Yale School of Divinity.
Each Pope uses its global platform to emphasize certain problems. John Paul II played an important role in the collapse of Soviet and European communism, planting the seeds of the solidarity labor movement in Poland when he made his first visit to his country of origin. Millions of people come to hear him speak, acting independently of the communist government, which emboldened them to protest against their authoritarian leaders.
Benedict XVI, a conservative scholar who sought to go back to the Church to the basic doctrine, emerged as a critic of the American war in Iraq and a champion of environmental protection.
Popes do not represent moral righteousness. In the most obvious example, the credibility of the Catholic Church has been severely undermined by a generalized crisis of sexual abuse that survivors and critics have said that multiple pontiffs have baffled.
The scholars are still debating whether Pius XII, World War II of the Pope, knew about the Holocaust and did not face Hitler, or remained publicly because he was fixing in secret, or at least allowed, local Catholic.
The global recognition of the Pope allows him to speak with a singular force. As a figure that transcends national interests, they can push political leaders to act for the collective good.
Francis, for example, in 2015, the first papal encyclical to focus on the environment, describing climate change as a threat whose greatest consequences fell on the shoulders of the poor. That same year, 195 nations signed a historical agreement in Paris and at least 10 world leaders cited the words of the Pope who would see addresses to the United Nations Conference.
The influence of a Pope, thought, has its limits, subject to the mercurial changes of international politics, cultural battles and macroconomic agitation. And one of the most fundamental principles of Catholicism, to advocate for peace, is the most difficult goal to achieve.
Francis said he was in a “secret mission” to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine, he stood on his knees to kiss the feet of the leaders at war of the South Sudan government and his opposition and, in his final speech of Easter before he died, made explicit appeals for peace in Ukraine and Gaza, which Leo exploded again on Sunday.
As just a voice on the world stage, the ability of a Pope to orchestrate change depends on the global political context. Francis became a potato at a time when there were natural allies such as former President Barack Obama in the United States and former Foreign Minister Angela Merkel in Germany who supported her friendly message with immigrants. When Francis died, the world had changed to a more right order, with President Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy.
Pope Francis “lost the spirit that migrant problems are more complicated and there are compensation,” said Miles Pattenden, Historian of Oxford, who studies the Catholic Church. If the new Pope added: “He continues and continues to say what Francis did, he will pounce more and more marginal.”
In some Issues in the cultural war, the activists on each side can seek to claim the new Pope as their own. Liberals will adopt their defense on behalf of the Oppressed. The conservatives will urge Leo to stay with the Catholic doctrine on issues such as homosexual marriage.
In the United States, where the new Pope, born and raised, some expect Leo to continue the role of Francisco as a counterweight for the anti -immigrant agenda of President Trump. “With religious law in the United States, having captured religion, and affirming that its faith supports its political views, having a Pope of the United States” that could challenge some of Trump’s pronouncements “is significant,” said Kaira Jewel Lingo, a Buddhist author and teacher of Dharma based in the state of New York.
It is too early to know how Pope Leo will exercise his voice outside the Church. Religious leaders warn against the shoe they do in ordered political frameworks.
People tend to project their desire that the Papa play for his team, asking “is pro-trump or is against Trump, as if Trump were the only thing that matters in the world,” said Graham Tomlin, director of the center of the Witan Cultural Church and an ex. “But in reality, the left-right polarity simply loses all the really interesting things of religion.”
Many constitute because the Pope to speak for his causes of pets, but can also speak of a desire for basic decency and acceptance, throughout religion.
“If what it says and what it represents is to honor all different people on earth, it is a person in power with such an influence that things can say,” said Samantha Berman, 31, who is Jewish and originally from Connecticut.
That alone, he said, can “make so many people feel seen, heard, loved.”
Josephine de la Bruyère and Elisabetta Povledo contributed reports from Rome.
