With the election of Robert Francis Prevost as Pope, Donald Trump is now the second most powerful American in the world. So said a seasoned Italian broadcaster to me, a few minutes after Prevost, who was born in Chicago in 1955, and who has now taken the name Leo XIV, delivered his first address from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. “The American Pope” is an appellation long attached to Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967, who enjoyed great power in Rome and led the U.S. bishops in support of this country’s wars in Korea and Vietnam and its military actions in Cold War “spheres of influence.” Now the tag is affixed to an actual American Pope. Overnight commentators, working from scant information, have parsed the nature of the new Pope’s Americanness. It has been pointed out that he gave his benediction (“La pace sia con tutti voi,” it began: “Peace be with all of you”) in Italian, Latin, and Spanish, but not English, his first language. The short biographical sketches of him have noted that he went to Peru as a missionary in 1985, at the age of thirty, and has scarcely lived in the U.S. since. He has been touted as a Villanova graduate (B.S., mathematics, 1977), and there was tussling online about whether he roots for the White Sox or the Cubs. (His brother John finally settled the matter, confirming that the new Pope is a Sox fan.) Reports also emerged—in the Black Catholic Messenger, on nola.com, and in the Times—of Prevost’s ancestry among Creole people of color in New Orleans, indicating that his heritage runs through the oppression, strife, and controversy over race that characterize the history of the U.S.
All of that is important, and it is likely to become more so as specifics of this little-known figure’s life and work emerge. But his personal circumstances may turn out to be less significant than the circumstances in which he has taken office. The first American Pope is also a wartime Pope, and the first phase of his pontificate will likely be defined by whether and how he brings the armature of peace to the violent conflicts currently rending the globe.
“The wartime Pope” is a phrase that usually refers to Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, the Italian who served as the head of the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958. Pacelli, who became a cardinal in 1929, was appointed Vatican Secretary of State the next year, and in 1933 he crafted a concordat with Adolf Hitler’s government, in Germany, whereby the Nazis would respect the Church’s autonomy in religious matters and, in return, the Vatican would effectively grant the Third Reich legitimacy, allowing it to require a loyalty oath of bishops and to forbid priests from engaging in political activity. (The concordat resembled a 1929 pact with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government, in Italy.) When Pacelli was elected Pope, on March 2, 1939, the world was embroiled in several conflicts. A civil war in Spain had led to the rise of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists (with German military support). Hitler had spoken publicly about the prospect of “the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe”; he would soon annex Czechoslovakia, invade Poland, and erect new concentration camps. The United States maintained its neutrality. In India, meanwhile, Mahatma Gandhi undertook a long fast in an effort to influence British colonial rule—as if to underscore that the global political order was larger and more complicated than continental statecraft acknowledged.
Eighty-six years later, the world is once again at war—“a Third World War in pieces,” as Pope Francis called it. In retrospect, this may be one of the most significant insights of his pontificate—the frank recognition that the number and gravity of violent conflicts constitute a world war that has largely gone unrecognized. Francis named those conflicts in his final public act, the Urbi et Orbi blessing he gave on Easter Sunday: the war between Israel and Palestine; the decade-long civil war in Yemen, stoked by other countries, which has led to “prolonged humanitarian crises”; the situation in Ukraine, which has been “devastated by war” by Russia (that latter country left unnamed): the ongoing strife between Armenia and Azerbaijan; the surging tensions in “the western Balkans” between Kosovo and Serbia; the clashes between military governments and armed rebel groups in “the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan and South Sudan . . . in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes region”; and the “long years of armed conflict” plaguing Myanmar. Francis also remembered “prisoners of war and political prisoners,” and noted “the growing climate of antisemitism.”
That was Sunday, April 20th. Since then, Israel has announced a plan to intensify its war on Gaza. India has fired missiles at Pakistani positions within the country, including the contested region of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, prompting a vow of retaliation from Pakistan. President Trump has stuck with his intention for the U.S. to annex Greenland, using military force if necessary.
What is a Pope to do? It is fair to say that Pope Francis’s words and gestures on behalf of peace (his denunciation of “the arms trade” as an industry “drenched in blood, often innocent blood” in an address to the U.S. Congress in 2015, to take one example) had little effect. The same could be said of his recent predecessors: Pope John Paul II, who met with or wrote to half a dozen world leaders and activists in 2003 in an effort to forestall the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and Pope Benedict, who spoke against the war then in progress in 2006. Edward Luce, the author of a new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born diplomat who served as President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, contends that Brzezinski’s friendship with the Polish Pope, John Paul II, “proved critical in late 1980 in dissuading the Soviets from invading Poland, where the Solidarity movement had just emerged as a serious challenge to the Communist government.” But only Pope John XXIII—whose fraternal letter to President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is thought to have eased the Cuban missile crisis—can be credited with an act of statecraft that helped preserve peace between nations. The judgment of history is that the policy of Pius XII, the original “wartime Pope,” of officious neutrality in the Second World War—and silence about the Holocaust—not only failed to bring peace but enabled the Nazis to murder six million Jews with impunity.
So the record is not encouraging. Yet, in the circumstances, a “Pope of Peace”—a tag already being applied to Leo in the Italian press—is precisely what is needed. Peace can never have enough advocates in high places. The Vatican’s commitment to negotiation as a means of resolving international conflicts and its concern for the effects of wars on poor people are the basis for a consistent doctrine of peace set forth by recent Popes. And a global order that, for all its drawbacks, has made world war more of a prospect than a fact for several decades is now subject to the whims of President Trump, who has developed the most incoherent of positions: that of the bellicose unilateral noninterventionist.
It’s possible that Trump and his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, will seek to uproot the freshly planted American papacy and graft it onto their own projects, the way that Vance paid a hasty visit to the ailing Francis during Holy Week, and the way the White House profaned the papal interregnum by circulating a chintzy mockup of Trump as an imperial Pope. But the new Pope Leo XIV’s profile gives reason to hope that he will stand firm. Opinion pieces reposted on his social-media account suggest that he opposes Trump’s anti-immigration policies. And during a long public interview at St. Jude Catholic Church in New Lenox, Illinois, last August, then Cardinal Prevost aligned himself with Pope Francis’s commitment to justice, signalling his support for “justice in terms of seeking, you know, true justice, for all people, especially for the downtrodden, reaching out to help the poor and the suffering and the immigrants and those who most need the mercy of God, who most need the Church, perhaps.”
Now Leo is in a position to carry forward the late Pope Francis’s efforts with vigor. Of the references to peace in his first address, the most striking was the one to the peace of Christ as “an unarmed and disarming peace, humble and persevering.” This idea of peace is itself disarming, especially coming from a Pope, and an American one at that. ♦
