As Pope Leo XIV wraps up his two-week vacation at Castel Gandolfo, Catholic commentators have continued to speculate on and debate his views and priorities. They are prognosticating on the kind of pope he will be and on the decisions he will make in the years ahead.
A little more than two months into his papacy, Leo has not yet granted a substantive interview to a journalist, nor has he issued a major document. Faced with a lack of concrete information about how Leo plans to lead the Church, many critics of Leo’s predecessor have nevertheless gleaned that the new pope represents a striking and substantive repudiation or “correction” of Francis’s pontificate.
Thus far, Pope Leo has delivered a steady output of public Masses and homilies, Angelus and general audience addresses, and speeches to groups visiting him at the Vatican or Castel Gandolfo. When compared with Pope Francis’s message, Leo’s words – the content of his statements – strongly imply that he intends to continue in Pope Francis’s path of building a synodal Church. Leo has indicated that the Vatican’s agreement with China on the appointment of bishops will continue. He has also continued to promote Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ and his predecessor’s call to care for creation. Leo has drawn from the pastoral message of Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which was much maligned by critics, saying that promoting an encounter with God “is not a matter of giving hasty answers to difficult questions, but of drawing close to people, listening to them, and trying to understand.” Additionally, Leo has received Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) prefect Cardinal Victor Fernández in private audiences on multiple occasions in these first weeks. Fernández, who is regularly maligned by Francis’s critics, recently indicated that Leo has no intention to reverse Fiducia Supplicans, the Church’s declaration allowing priests to bless irregular and same-sex couples under certain conditions. Many traditionalist and reactionary Catholics have condemned Fiducia, and former DDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Muller wrote that the teaching “logically leads to heresy.”
In addition to his seeming endorsement of Francis’s Magisterium, Leo has appointed a number of bishops, curial officials, and members of dicasteries in his first weeks as pope. Continuing Francis’s precedent of appointing women in leadership roles in the Church, he named Sister Tiziana Merletti as secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Replacing Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia – who reached the mandatory retirement age of 80 on Easter Sunday, the day before Pope Francis’s death – as President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Leo promoted the Academy’s chancellor, Msgr. Renzo Pegoraro, as his replacement. Given the opposition to Archbishop Paglia and the Academy as a whole during Francis’s pontificate, Leo’s appointment of Pegoraro was a strong sign of continuity and commitment to Francis’s reforms.
A few far-right Catholics have expressed concern or outrage over some of Pope Leo’s early episcopal appointments. For example, Bishop Joseph Strickland – who was removed by Pope Francis as bishop of Tyler in Texas in 2023 – railed against Leo’s picks for the new Archbishop of Brisbane in Australia and the bishop-elect in the Diocese of Baker, Oregon. Other Catholics point out that Leo is simply following Francis’s approach of appointing bishops who are faithful to Church teaching and are, first and foremost, pastors. This should not be surprising, since Pope Leo headed the Dicastery for Bishops under Pope Francis and was intimately involved in the selection of bishops around the world.
Some conservative Catholics who would likely be disappointed by Leo’s papacy thus far have attempted to put a “positive” spin on it by primarily focusing on his clothing, vestments, and use of Latin as indications of a break with the legacy of Pope Francis, whom they believe abandoned or dispensed with many aspects of Catholic tradition. Small decisions, such as Leo’s choice not to reside in Casa Santa Marta and to return to the practice of imposing the pallium on newly appointed archbishops. Some have gone so far as to interpret Leo’s praise for the Eastern liturgy[1] as some sort of coded message indicating that he plans to reverse Pope Francis’s restrictions on the Tridentine Mass.
Additionally, some Catholic media outlets are treating as newsworthy Pope Leo’s recent letter congratulating Cardinal Raymond Burke on the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination, suggesting that it indicates a change in direction from Pope Francis’s pontificate. Catholic News Agency’s Courtney Mares described the note as “a gesture that marks a shift in tone.” They are apparently unaware that such letters to high-ranking prelates from the pope are a matter of protocol.
For example, Pope Francis wrote a 50th anniversary note in the same format to Cardinal Angelo Becciu in August 2022, nearly two years after Francis stripped him of his privileges as a cardinal. The letter — which, like Burke’s, is written in Latin — congratulated Becciu for his “long-standing ministry,” “diligent service in the diplomatic missions of the Holy See,” “dedicated labor carried out in the Apostolic See,” and his “concern to bear witness to the Gospel message through your works, with which you have earnestly striven for the good of the Church.” Clearly there was already a precedent of popes sending warm anniversary letters to cardinals who have fallen out of favor before Cardinal Burke received his.
Not everyone on the Catholic right is grasping for signs. Some have simply chosen to embrace Pope Leo with fervor that borders on ultramontanism. Deacon Keith Fournier, Bishop Strickland’s former advisor and ghostwriter, posted on X, “I am so encouraged by Pope Leo’s homilies, allocutions, and messages. They are inspiring, faithful and in keeping with his role as successor of Peter. … I will not succumb to what I have called “the hermeneutic of suspicion”, reading everything through doubt and fear, rather than living faith.”
Where was this kind of trust when Francis was pope?
I must admit that I was amused to see retired theology professor Larry Chapp appear on Catholics Unscripted – a militantly anti-Francis UK-based podcast that has promoted the work of an antisemitic holocaust-denying and Hitler-defending priest (Fr James Mawdsley) who was canonically expelled from the traditionalist Fraternal Society of St Peter – with host Mark Lambert to wax poetic about subtle signs that they believe Pope Leo is sending that indicate he is radically different from his predecessor.
One such attempt was when Chapp argues that Pope Leo’s mention of “collegiality” in conjunction with synodality signals a substantial shift from Pope Francis’s understanding:
“He spoke of synodality, but he immediately linked it with collegiality – which, to me as a theologian, these are subtle tells. In poker, you’d call it a “tell,” right? A subtle tell when he links it to collegiality, because one of the criticisms of synodality is that it has marginalized the bishops – taking the Synod of Bishops and turned it into a kind of ecclesial assembly of laypeople, voting and so forth. … I think that his mentioning of collegiality is a way of signaling that he wants to restore the authority of the bishops. A synodal Church? Yes, yes, yes, yes – but a synodal Church grounded in the authority of the episcopacy – of the apostolic succession – and not some freewheeling conversation in a hall around round tables chit chatting, you know, about this and that.”
Chapp must not have noticed the numerous times that Pope Francis linked synodality and collegiality in his own teachings, from the opening address at the first synodal assembly of his papacy in 2014 through paragraph 136 of the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality – which Pope Francis adopted as ordinary Magisterium in October 2024 – and many times in between. Perhaps Pope Leo did mean something different from Pope Francis, but it was unlikely that the mere mention of collegiality (as Francis did many times before him) was a sign of it.
Nevertheless, Lambert (whose response to the death of Pope Francis was entitled “Death of a Tyrant”) was impressed, responding, “Very exciting! So I think that’s a really good point. The synod and synodality – we kind of got the feeling that it was very vague, didn’t we? That there was no real trajectory for it.”
Perhaps if he and Chapp hadn’t spent so much time attacking Francis, they might have noticed that the trajectory of synodality was already well underway – and that Leo is largely following it. In fact, the more I see comments that treat Leo’s affirmations of Francis’s teachings as if they are unrelated, new, and exciting, the more it becomes clear that Francis’s critics really did cover their ears and harden their hearts to his message. It was obvious at the time that they were not listening to Francis. I did not realize that some of them would like his message when it is delivered by someone else.
Sooner or later, something will have to give. Will Francis’s critics accept that Pope Leo isn’t going to roll back the clock? Will they finally reassess their narrative about Francis? Or will they continue to cling to the fantasy that Leo is quietly correcting the “errors” of his predecessor?
Only time will tell.
In the meantime, one recent episode may offer insight into how Pope Leo differs from Francis – not in theology, but in method. And that’s the topic of my next article: the resolution of the Syro-Malabar Church’s liturgy war in India.
Note
[1] “We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!”
Image: By Hermann Rorschach (died 1922) – https://web.archive.org/web/20070820233339/http://ar.geocities.com/test_de_rorschach/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3594383
Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. He and Jeannie Gaffigan co-host Field Hospital, a U.S. Catholic podcast.
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