The Vatican was looking for an improved Francis model, and just might have found one in Leo XIV

Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. His latest book is The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis.

It has become customary to review the performance of political leaders after their first 100 days in office.

Popes, of course, are not political leaders – although they remain head of the Vatican City State, a sovereign entity – and the first 100 days is a mere drop in the holy font given the length of contemporary papacies. They also do not run for re-election. Once a conclave has done its work, the matter is settled – unless you resign like Benedict XVI, in which case the College of Cardinals has to start all over again.

Pope Francis remained in office until his death, so the conclave that saw the election of the first American pope conformed to the traditional protocols. The result: A comparatively young Augustinian friar from Chicago with long stints in Peru, as well as time spent in the Vatican bureaucracy, or Curia, is the new pontiff. Cardinal Robert Prevost now has a new name and august responsibilities as Leo XIV.

The cardinal electors intentionally chose a prelate who is not Francis. They did not choose an anti-Francis; they wanted a custodian, not an innovator; they wanted a stabilizer. In short, they wanted an improved Francis model.

Whereas Francis humanized the papacy, simplified its trappings, eschewed its solemn splendour, and popularized the papal personality, Leo has revised much of the older style with its raiment and regal bearing, and disports himself with a dignity of gait and manner reminiscent of Pope Paul VI. The ebullience of the Argentine has been replaced with the reserve of the American.

This is not to suggest that Leo is lacking in personal warmth – those who know him all attest to his natural humility and native kindness in attending to them one-on-one – but the charismatic leadership of Francis is not replicated by the new Bishop of Rome.

Leo is a canon lawyer by training – the first such pope in over a century – and that professional formation speaks to the way he approaches the challenges facing the church. A graduate of the Angelicum, the Dominican pontifical university in Rome that is known for its constitutionally conservative canon-law faculty, Leo fine-tuned his legal credentials when he served as a priest and bishop in Peru, erecting legal tribunals and negotiating fraught relationships between an ultra-conservative hierarchy and an authoritarian political regime.

What Pope Leo’s social media tells us about the first American pontiff’s views

Reflecting his legal education, Leo’s natural disposition is to move with caution and a steady hand: forensic, deliberative and risk-averse. He was at one point the Prior-General of his religious order; he even wrote his dissertation on the role of the local prior or religious superior, a prescient statement of how he sees the law’s ability to create a culture of leadership defined by service and not self-aggrandizement. He was also educated at Villanova University in Philadelphia, an Augustinian institution, taking his degree in mathematics, a subject that values the qualities of predictability, order and symmetry.

Mathematics and canon law shape Leo’s thinking. But there are limitations to such a formation. The eminent Irish theologian Gabriel Daly, an Augustinian like Leo, publicly mused that his order sent him to Rome to learn what to think, and then to Oxford to learn how to think.

The parochial nature of Leo’s early years is, however, greatly offset by the hands-on experience he had for two decades as a missionary. His canon law background was supplemented by his vast pastoral experience.

Francis’s efforts to recharge the church’s updating, or aggiornamento, to maximize the involvement of the laity at every level of church life, from Vatican governance to local diocesan decision-making, were sometimes stillborn, the casualty of hierarchical tepidity and clerical apprehension. Francis was changing the very nature of the church, his critics argued, and we needed to restore the old order before it became a footnote.

Leo, a trusted confidant of Francis, offers the prospect of restoration and continuity. He departs from the Francis style, but retains a commitment to the Francis projects. His approach is understated rather than theatrical; he will not undo what Francis began, but will mitigate, with that practised Vatican subtlety honed over centuries, the troublesome elements that threaten to fracture rather than unify.

But there are potential cracks in such an approach. For instance, much of the current crisis in credibility in the Catholic Church is attributable to clerical misgovernance, if not malfeasance. If the clergy – or more specifically, the “curse of clericalism” that holds them captive – define the heart of the problem, then the selection of candidates for the priesthood, the model and curriculum of their training, and the process of identifying and promoting bishops, all call out for reform. Francis was a severe and consistent critic of the clergy, exhorting them to a behaviour that conforms to the Gospel rather than a lifestyle redolent of privilege.

Leo, by contrast, inclines to the affirmation rather than the exhortation mode. He befriends rather than berates.

But there will come a time when he will need to make hard decisions about the reforming agenda of his predecessor, and although he may have a reformer’s instinct, he has yet to evidence a reformer’s zeal. Francis’s prophetic commitment to what he called synodality – a new way of being as a church – entails more than a safe endorsement of synodality as a new attitude or style. It means substantive and history-altering changes that require more than a papal blessing.

How far down that road the Augustinian Consolidator will follow the Jesuit Disruptor has yet to be mapped.