Four months after his election to succeed Francis as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Leo XIV welcomed James Martin, an American priest, to the Vatican. The message Martin came away with from his first audience with the Pope was clear.
“Pope Leo will be continuing with the same openness that Francis showed to LGBTQ Catholics,” Martin, who campaigns for the greater acceptance of gay Catholics by the Church, said on Monday. “For me, it was a deeply consoling meeting. Please pray for the Holy Father.”
The audience with Martin marked the Pope’s first public tackling of a tricky topic that split the Church during Francis’s fractious 12-year papacy. The American pope has promised to live up to his motto, “In the one, we are one,” and to bring unity back to the Church, drawing together admirers of
Francis’s outreach to gays, divorcees and migrants with those who loathed him for it.
The Pope met wellwishers in St Peter’s Square last week as he returned to public life after a holiday in Castel Gandolfo
EVANDRO INETTI/ZUMA
However, Martin’s claim that the Pope will push on with Francis’s inclusive approach quickly drew a harsh reaction from conservatives, suggesting that Leo’s honeymoon with hardliners could grind to a halt.
John-Henry Weston, the co-founder of the US ultra-conservative LifeSite news site, described the audience as a “nightmare scenario”, while Luigi Casalini, an Italian conservative commentator, told The Times the meeting was “a grave error”.
Writing on the blog Messainlatino, Casalini added: “The problem with Leo, with all due respect, is that for now he has to keep everyone happy … We fear this won’t work in the long term, but we will see in the next year or two.”
The audience marked a busy week for the Pope after a summer spent bedding in at the Vatican without taking a papal trip or publishing a document to indicate where he wants to take the Church.
Keeping faith with Pietro Parolin, Francis’s secretary of state, and assisted by his long-time Peruvian secretary and tennis partner, Father Edgard Iván Rimaycuna Inga, Leo, 69, avoided the Rome heat by retreating to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo in the hills south of the capital.
Now back in Rome, the normally shy Chicagoan, formerly known as Robert Prevost, was clearly learning about photo-ops, posing at a general audience in St Peter’s Square on a white motorbike due to be auctioned for charity.
Pope Leo posed with a BMW R18 motorbike in St Peter’s Square
VATICAN MEDIA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
This summer he gratefully accepted a Chicago pizza topped with sausage handed him by a wellwisher while he was riding the popemobile. “His bodyguards took it from him to make sure it was safe. He did reheat it. He did eat every bit of it,” his older brother, John Prevost, a retired Chicago school teacher, said.
Prevost told NBC he still spoke to his brother daily and played Wordle with him, sometimes starting phone conversations with “Is this His Holiness?” to which the Pope jokingly replies: “Yes, my child, how may I help you?”
John Prevost with a picture of him and his brothers from 1958. Pope Leo, three, is on the left, with John, four, and Louis, seven
OBED LAMY/AP
The Pope has received positive reviews from Raymond Burke, a US cardinal and conservative arch-enemy of Francis, for talking about God in his homilies rather than wading into social issues. “He always speaks of the Lord and his Church,” Burke told La Stampa, adding: “We must pray for him and help him.” This marks a shift for the cardinal, who condemned Francis’s church as a “ship without a rudder”.
Leo was equally effusive, thanking Burke for his “zeal” in serving the Church and giving him a private audience last month. Compare that with Francis, who claimed that conservative prelates dressing in “lace, fancy trimmings and rochets” — a clear reference to Burke — were potentially suffering from “mental imbalance, emotional deviation” and “behavioural difficulties”.
Burke’s belief that Leo prefers to let God do the talking was backed by the new Pope’s first homily in May, when he urged priests to “move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified”.
In a positive essay on the Pope, Roberto de Mattei, Italian arch-conservative commentator, wrote: “The references to Christ and therefore to the supernatural nature of the Church, appears to be a constant in the first months of the papacy.”
Other positive signs seized on by conservatives include the Pope opting for traditional red papal garb after his election and his decision in July to send Robert Sarah, a Guinean cardinal, conservative icon and foe of Francis, to preside over a religious event in France in July.
Leo delighted conservatives on August 18 when he cautioned South American bishops against being a “slave or worshipper of nature” — a clear departure from Francis’s 2019 synod on the Amazon, when statues of Andean earth goddess Pachamama were set up in the Vatican, prompting accusations from conservatives that Francis was dabbling in pagan idolatry.
Francis met representatives from the Amazon when he visited Peru in 2018
CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Traditionalists are now hoping that Leo will reverse Francis’s 2021 restrictions on celebrating mass in Latin, a practice that they cherish, which Francis claimed was a rallying cry for dissent against him.
Then came the audience with Martin, a wake-up call for the traditionalists. “So far, Leo’s gracious attentiveness to all has gone down very well — everyone has been delighted with him,” said Austen Ivereigh, a Vatican expert. “But he is not a conservative and will build on Francis’s legacy, albeit with a different style.”
He added: “Leo’s big choices are still ahead of him, starting with the appointments he will make in the Vatican Curia this month and Catholics will only truly get to know him thanks to those choices.”
Vatican watchers are waiting to see if the Pope will push on with the cycle of synods Francis launched to spur discussion about making the church hierarchy more responsive to Catholics in the pews. “Leo was a good listener at the synod last year,” claimed Martin, who sat next to him at the event.
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Conservatives have been less impressed by the synods. The late cardinal George Pell damned them as a “toxic nightmare” of glib speeches that eroded the fundamental hierarchy of the Church.
Martin told The Times he was optimistic that the Pope would win over Francis’s foes. “Leo will inevitably do something to bother one side or the other, but he has a lot of goodwill behind him; people want unity and he is more circumspect than Francis. I believe he can do it.”
Francis at the weekly general audience at the Vatican in September 2023
VATICAN MEDIA/REUTERS
Leo has said that he chose his papal name to honour Leo XIII, the 19th-century pope, who campaigned for better wages for factory workers. He has warned that artificial intelligence is the next looming threat to workers’ rights. For a pope who is meant to stick to talking about God that could prove an irritant for Burke and his followers.
In a oddly prescient preface Leo wrote for a book in 2023, he neatly summed up the challenge he now faces in keeping the church from splitting apart.
“The vertical and horizontal dimensions of the Church sometimes seem irreconcilable. Those who prefer a vertical Church which looks only towards God are certainly not wrong, but I don’t think that those who look to their brothers and sisters and see part of their mission in the horizontal dimension of the Church are wrong either,” he wrote.
“How many questions do we face today?” he added, listing social concerns the Church must face, from violence against women, child abuse, “attention to divorcees, the remarried and members of the LGBTQ community” to climate change.
“[They are] some of the social themes that need to be studied and responded to,” he wrote. “What do we say?”