Despite being the first pope from America, a country where the Catholic Church is known for its relative conservatism, Pope Leo XIV — who spent much of his adult life working in Peru — is expected to largely continue his predecessor’s progressive reforms, despite some past comments criticizing the acceptance of LGBTQ+ “lifestyle choices.”
James Martin, an American Jesuit priest and the founder of Outreach, a prominent Catholic LGBTQ+ organization, told Salon that the new pope’s background in Latin America “means that he understands the global south,” a fact that likely contributed to his being selected as pontiff.
“I think that gave him some appeal for a lot of the cardinals,” Martin said.
On many issues, such as his advocacy for immigrants, Leo — who before this month was known as Cardinal Robert Prevost — is expected to act in line with the direction taken by Pope Francis, which might be expected given the high-ranking roles that Francis appointed him to. His choice of the name Leo has also drawn attention for his namesake, Pope Leo XIII.
Kristy Nabhan-Warran, a professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Iowa and an expert on Hispanic Catholicism, told Salon she took special note of this name, given that Leo XIII was known as an advocate for workers during the industrial revolution from 1878 to 1903. Leo himself made this connection, saying he chose the name to emphasize the social teaching the church offers in light of modern challenges, like artificial intelligence, that require a “defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Nabhan-Warran said that while the new pope “has not been called a liberation theologian,” his work in Peru mirrors some of the values espoused by liberation theologians, “because among liberation theologians and liberation pastors, you have to walk the walk.”
“There are stories about him that are circulating, that are verified stories, carrying rice on his back to keep one’s parish,” Nabhan-Warran said. “You could say that this pope, Pope Leo XIV, when he was a cardinal and bishop and just parish priest, and before that, he was very much a pope of the people.”
Others, like Leo’s longtime friend Mark R. Francis, the former president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, point to his role in the Order of St. Augustine, which emphasizes bringing people together and building community. In the order’s own words, its roughly 2,800 members aim to “build community and serve the Lord’s people.”
“I think he’s going to be concerned with bringing people together, and that’s part of the Augustian spirituality and something that I’m sure he’s going to follow through with,” Francis said. He told Salon that he expects Leo to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps but that he expects him to do so in a more deliberative and procedural way.
“He’s not going to be shooting from the hip in terms of issues,” Francis said. “He’s less extroverted and exuberant. He’s less spontaneous. He’s going to be more deliberative, and that’s just his personality.”
Some comments from the new pope on LGBTQ+ issues, however, have drawn scrutiny and prompted speculation that he might lean more conservative. At the 2012 Synod of Bishops, a gathering where bishops convene to discuss church matters, he told the group he complained about how “alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema,” according to the Catholic News Service.
“The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that the mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective,” Leo said.
But Francis, who has known Leo since the 1970s, said that he expects the social justice aspects of his ministry to be “very important,” adding that he “wouldn’t place too much confidence in stuff he said in 2012.
“We all evolve on some of these more delicate issues,” he said. And Leo is not perceived as representing the more conservative faction of the U.S. church. “As one of the cardinals said, he’s the least American of all the American cardinals,” Francis said, referencing Leo’s career of service in Peru.
Indeed, in more recent comments Leo has struck a different tone on LGBTQ+ issues than he did more than a decade ago. When Leo was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2023, Leo was asked whether his views had evolved under the influence of Francis.
“Doctrine hasn’t changed, and people haven’t said, yet, you know, we’re looking for that kind of change, but we are looking to be more welcoming and more open, and to say all people are welcome in the church,” he responded.
Michael O’Loughlin, executive director of Outreach, the LGBTQ+ Catholic organization, told Salon that he’s hopeful but still waiting to see how Leo acts as pope.
“The interpretation people are making seems to be based on one comment from 2012, which was admittedly a more conservative tone, but that was a year before Pope Francis was elected, so his views may have shifted,” O’Loughlin told Salon. “I’m also keeping an open mind because some of his comments yesterday seem to suggest he’s more in line with Pope Francis.”
O’Loughlin added that, in the days after Francis’ election, there was also discussion of several past comments that were seen as anti-LGBTQ+, “but he obviously took another direction.”
If Leo is to follow his predecessor’s direction, it’s likely to put him at loggerheads with conservative Catholic leaders in the United States, who are broadly seen as more reactionary than their peers, particularly in Europe.
Leo’s career in Peru also seems to have been integral to his election as pope. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and columnist at the National Catholic Reporter, was at the Vatican when Leo was elected pope. In his telling, that victory was powered by stalwart support from Latin American cardinals.
“What seems to have happened is that the Latin American cardinals were solidly united behind Prevost, and as a result, on the first ballot, he got a lot more votes than was expected, whereas some of the other people who were the supposed front runners didn’t get as many votes as they thought they would,” Reese told Salon.
On potentially finding himself at odds with the American Church and the conservative faction within it, Reese cautioned that “Conservative Catholics in America have a very loud megaphone, but they don’t have a lot of troops.”
He pointed to a Pew Research survey from April of 2024, which found that 75% of American Catholics had a favorable opinion of Francis, despite him becoming a political lightning rod among American conservatives in the last five years of his life.
“Any politician in Washington would kill for those numbers,” Reese said.
Reese compared the election to early presidential primaries, when a candidate’s performance is often not just compared to how well other candidates did, but also to the expectations others had for them ahead of the election.
“Expectations of Prevost were low, and he exceeded them, and the cardinals started to say, ‘Who’s this?’ and they took a look at them and liked him,” Reese said. “The Latin American cardinals were totally on board with him. They didn’t see him as a Gringo, they saw him as a colleague. They felt that he may have been born in the United States but that his heart was in Latin America.”
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