Pope Leo has an odd kind of half smile that leaves observers unsure of what he is really thinking. “I call it his ‘Mona Lisa smile’, and he has had it since we met in 1969 when we were 14,” says Mike Greco, who attended St Augustine Seminary High School in Michigan with the Pope, then Robert Prevost, and remained friends with him since.
“It’s the smile of someone who listens, who is sincere and doesn’t have to impress people or assert himself,” said Greco, 70.
“Behind the smile is the analytical mind of a maths major, which makes him an excellent administrator, but people don’t see that because of his pastoral presence,” he added. “This year Leo has been gathering information to take on a huge responsibility — the financial and spiritual wellbeing of the church.”
During Christmas morning Mass
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Seven months after his election in May, the first American pope started to ring the changes when he named Richard Moth, a British bishop, to replace the retiring Cardinal Vincent Nichols as the new Archbishop of Westminster this month.
More importantly, he appointed a little-known US bishop, Ronald Hicks, as the new Archbishop of New York — a key American archdiocese previously led by a conservative Trump supporter.
A Chicagoan in Rome
Hicks is very much a Leo man. Both hail from the Chicago area and spent years in Latin America — Leo as a missionary in Peru, Hicks in El Salvador where he ran a network of orphanages.
Hicks will take over from the retiring archbishop, Timothy Dolan, who prayed at President Trump’s inauguration and called Charlie Kirk, the conservative commentator who was shot dead in September, “a modern-day St Paul”.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, right, and his successor Ronald Hicks arrive to lead a Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on December 18
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Massimo Faggioli, a theologian at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin, said: “This is the end of an era. Dolan was a leader and symbol for the majority of US bishops who opposed the Democrats and liberal culture.”
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Leo, 70, has already made clear his hostility to Trump’s round-ups of illegal migrants and he went further this month, warning a group of hard-right European politicians that if they wanted to use Christianity to bolster their brand of conservative identity politics they could not forget about the principle of caring for the needy.
That does not mean Leo will slam the door on conservatives. They share opposition to abortion, surrogacy and same-sex marriage, proving the left-right optics of politics do not apply to religion.
But conservative Catholics already have reservations about the new pope, which should make for lively debate at the first consistory of the church’s 245 cardinals Leo has called on January 7-8.
Often held to coincide with the naming of new saints, this consistory has been called “extraordinary” and is strictly business.
Holding a statue of Baby Jesus during the Christmas Eve Mass in St Peter’s Basilica
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No one expects Leo to lay down the law at the gathering. The Vatican has said cardinals will be expected to offer “support and advice” to the Pope and the key will be “the reinforcing of the communion” between the pontiff and his cardinals.
Leo is well aware that at meetings held before his election cardinals complained about Francis’s reliance on a tight coterie of advisers to rule.
But if Leo can build consensus in the college of cardinals, those who know him say he will not be afraid to make decisions designed to steady the church after years of financial and sexual scandals.
“When he sees a truth, he defends it,” said Father Alejandro Moral Antón, the former head of Leo’s religious order, the Augustinians. “Pope Leo will make 2026 his year.”
Alberto Melloni, a church historian, said: “The cardinals at the conclave in May wanted a pope who was less visible than Francis but it is inevitable there will soon be arguments in the Curia and they will need direction.”
The papal fitness regime
So why wait until the start of 2026 to get his reign truly under way with the consistory?
The Pope has spent this year wrapping up business started by Francis. He finished and issued an apostolic exhortation about caring for the poor started by his predecessor and visited Turkey and Lebanon — a trip Francis put off because of his fading health.
He has, however, already carved out a lifestyle at the Vatican that is radically different to that of Francis. While the Argentinian pope avoided the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo just outside Rome, and stayed at the Vatican, piling on the pounds, Leo spends every Tuesday there, playing tennis with his longtime assistant, Father Edgard Iván Rimaycuna Inga.
The Pope, a keen tennis player, during a visit to the Pontifical Paul VI Institute in Castel Gandolfo
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Leo used to work out with the Peruvian priest at a gym near the Vatican, and they may soon be hitting the weights again — this time at the papal apartment.
In a December interview with National Catholic Reporter, Leo’s older brother, John Prevost, revealed that the Pope was planning to install fitness equipment at the large apartment, which is being renovated.
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That is another switch from Francis, who found the apartment too grand and lived at the Casa Santa Marta, a Vatican residence for priests.
Unlike Francis, Leo has also taken on the formal trappings of his role, said Prevost. “He doesn’t go out unless he’s dressed as the Pope, even if it’s just us. We went on the roof, who is going to see him? But he had to be dressed [in white],” he said.
In another contrast with Francis, Leo will not be surrounding himself with an inner circle of advisers, said Faggioli. “He wants to do things through the Vatican dicasteries,” he said.
When it comes to meals the Pope is anything but formal, sometimes knocking up a sandwich for dinner with Rimaycuna if they have worked a long day.
“If they don’t have time to cook because he got in late, he might have a peanut butter sandwich, a bowl of cereal, that kind of thing,” said Prevost. Late at night, when he cannot sleep, Leo is up playing the Scrabble-like online word game Words with Friends at 3am, Prevost said.
According to the Italian daily La Repubblica, another late-night activity of the Pope has been learning German using the Duolingo app to add to his fluent Spanish and Italian.
Then there is his nightly Wordle challenge with his brother, for which Leo uses a new word every night to get things going.
A pope on a mission
In the new year, Leo will be back on the road, starting with a visit to Algeria, the birthplace in the 4th century of St Augustine, who inspired the order Leo ran before he became pope.
The trip shows that he is not shy about putting his own very personal experience of faith at the centre of his agenda. “St Augustine has guided Leo’s life and for any Augustinian a trip to Algeria is very special, you feel it is your country,” said Moral Antón.
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He said the trip would be a chance for Leo to promote coexistence with Islam, a campaign he has willingly inherited from Francis.
“At Annaba in Algeria, next to the cathedral where Augustine was bishop, there is a monastery containing a hospital that contains a small mosque to allow locals being cured to pray,” Moral Antón said.
The new year will also be about raising cash for the church, even if Leo has benefited from an increase in the Vatican budget, which had a surplus of €1.6 million last year after a €51.2 million deficit the year before, thanks to a slight rise in donations and more cash from the Vatican’s hospitals and property empire.
Keen to crack down on bad financial management, Leo this month disbanded a Vatican fundraising committee set up in Francis’s dying days which was staffed by Italians with scant experience. The set-up proved a turn-off for rich American Catholics who hand over the majority of donations to the Catholic church and are suspicious of Italian clerics doing the accountancy.
Meanwhile, in the US the Leo effect on donors has kicked in, according to Ward Fitzgerald, the president of the board of trustees of the Papal Foundation, which raises about $20 million a year from wealthy US donors for Vatican charitable initiatives. “Donations are up about 20 per cent this year, thanks to having a native English speaker as pope,” he said.
Monsignor Roger Landry, the director of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA, the Vatican’s US missionary fundraising operation, said an annual online collection held in October raised twice as much as last year.
“The election of Pope Leo has instilled a lot of trust in American Catholics, many of whom — especially among major donors — have been negatively impacted by recent Vatican financial scandals,” he said.
“There’s the expectation he will bring the leaven of American accountability practices to the Vatican and we’ve already seen evidence of that in his first seven months on the job,” he added.
Will Leo unify or divide?
However, conservative US donors are starting to “scratch their heads” about Leo’s outreach to gay Catholics and his attacks on Trump’s migrant policies, said John Yep, the president of Catholics for Catholics, a self-described militant organisation. “Americans are shifting to a more conservative Catholicism and their money is backing traditionalist bishops,” he said.
Yep’s group has fired a warning shot at Leo by publishing a book called The Trojan Horse in the Catholic Church, which condemns the synods Francis opened to lay participants, including women, to discuss the future of the church.
Waving to the crowds from the popemobile on Christmas Day
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The gatherings, which have been backed by Leo, are destroying the church’s hierarchy, according to traditionalists such as the German cardinal Gerhard Müller, who wrote the introduction to the book. “It seems these synods will be a bedrock of Leo’s papacy,” Yep said.
At the January 7 consistory, if Müller rises to speak, Leo will be under pressure to take sides. “What’s going to happen when the honeymoon is over? Because eventually he’s going to have to make some tough decisions that won’t please the whole crowd, which you can’t do all the time,” his brother told National Catholic Reporter.
But Leo’s childhood friend Mike Greco said that if anyone can heal divisions in the church, the new pope from Chicago is the man to do it.
“At high school, when there were issues between students, he always had the moderating tone. He hasn’t changed, and today he is ready to talk to people with different views and bring them together,” he said.