A Pope of Hope?

A message from Rome

It is the height of American self-centeredness to see every occurrence on the global stage through the lens of how it pertains to us.

However, we justify this view through an undeniable truth: For decades, our nation has been the most dominant power—militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. There are forces, akin to the laws of physics, that shape the fate of nations, and the United States exerts a disproportionate gravitational pull on the rest of the world. Even now—perhaps especially now—as an erratic, self-destructive tyrant claws at and tears down the norms and structures that once defined global order, everyone else is left to adjust to a chaos they did not choose and cannot control.

I must confess that until this week I hadn’t given much thought as to why there had never been a pope from the United States. If someone had asked, I probably would’ve chalked it up to the law of averages. There’s only one pope at a time, the world is a big place, and there are a lot of Catholics. Also, the Italians have had the inside track for centuries. But in retrospect, reading the analysis around the selection of a new pontiff, it made perfect sense why the cardinals felt that the Successor to St. Peter perhaps shouldn’t come from a country already casting such a massive shadow on the rest of the world.

But of course, that changed with the selection of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost—now Pope Leo XIV—who, like my parents, was born in Chicago. It’s been hilarious to watch the memes pop up almost immediately, pairing the new pontiff with deep-dish pizza, beef sandwiches, and “da Bears.” A more personal joy was learning that his true sports loyalty—like any self-respecting soul from the southern Chicagoland area—lies with the White Sox (and certainly not the Cubs). That’s yet another thing he shares with my family. I loved seeing that someone found footage of the future Pope Leo in the stands twenty years ago, when the Sox swept the Astros in the World Series.

Yet we’ve also learned that Pope Leo’s story is far bigger than regional stereotypes—it speaks to broader themes that have shaped human history. We are, after all, a species forever in motion and migration. Pope Leo is a descendant of the Creole community in New Orleans and of European immigrants. Talk about multiculturalism. As an adult, he left the United States to spend considerable time in Peru, where he even became a citizen.

His varied background gives us yet another example of the narrow way the United States sees and projects itself to the world. When Pope Leo was selected, he was often described in our press as the first American pope—because we’ve appropriated the term “American” to mean “from the United States.” But Pope Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, hailed from Argentina, in South America. By that logic, Pope Leo is actually the second American pope.

These semantics feel especially pointed now, when we have a president of the United States hellbent on renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America—a profoundly stupid symbolic act that lays bare the darker forces roiling this nation.

Pope Francis never shied away from condemning the inhumanity, greed, and explicitly anti-immigrant politics ascendant in the United States—politics championed by many Catholics in power, including Vice President JD Vance. It was hard not to read into the fact that Vance was among the last to meet with Francis before his death. So it came as little surprise that much of the early U.S. coverage framed Pope Leo’s election in relation to the MAGA mindset.

Was the selection of Pope Leo a direct rebuke of Trump and a culture of cruelty and division? Perhaps. But assuming so is mostly about us is, once again, a reflection of our own ego. As anyone who’s seen Conclave can attest, the deliberately opaque process of choosing a pope involves far more input, deliberation, intuition, and spiritual discernment than a political message about the leadership of the United States.

Still, we cannot ignore the reality that there is a deep and ongoing conflict within the global Catholic Church—between reactionary and progressive forces over the direction, priorities, and identity of the Church in the modern world. In the United States, we’ve seen a rise in conservative Catholicism, one that has prioritized social issues like abortion and sexuality, and has grown increasingly aligned with nationalist and authoritarian politics. Five of the six conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholic. Only one of the liberals is.

Where will the new pope stand? Will he follow in his predecessor’s footsteps as a champion of the poor, the powerless, the marginalized, and the dispossessed? The early signs certainly point to yes, leading many to speculate that the selection of Pope Leo was meant to signal that there is a moral—and by definition Christian—way to approach not only spirituality but the realm of human affairs, one that diverges from the cruelty and destruction we are now witnessing.

For many of us in the United States who are deeply worried about the direction of our country, the hope is that Pope Leo might become a counterforce to the greed, corruption, racism, environmental devastation, and power-hungry mindset now running and dominating our nation.

This is not all about us. But it is about the future of the planet and the way we live together. It is about a vision of who leaders are meant to serve, what goals we should pursue as a society, the moral codes we live by, and how we treat each other.

There is much that I find objectionable in the institution of the Catholic Church. It is far from perfect—just like any institution ultimately shaped by the faults and frailties we all carry with us. To be human is to be a mass of contradictions and instincts. Which do we follow? Which do we embolden? Which do we prioritize? 

At a time of great turmoil, with currents pulling us in competing directions, it does feel, however, that the white smoke that ushered in a new era in Rome came infused with a sense of hope.

It is another sign that all is not lost—and that we must each do our part to stand for those who cannot stand for themselves. That is how we help those in need. But it is also how we protect our democracy. Our world. And ultimately ourselves.

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