Consider This from NPR - This American pope

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

The cardinals have elected a new pope: Robert Prevost, a cardinal born in Chicago. He has taken the name Leo XIV. He is the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church.NPR's Scott Detrow has been in Rome all week. He talks through what we might expect from Pope Leo XIV with NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose, and former, longtime NPR Rome correspondent Sylvia Poggioli.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

These words we expected to hear this week. Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum. Latin for I announce to you a great joy, we have a pope. Habemus papam. These words we were not expecting. Oh my goodness. The pope is from Chicago. My co-host Scott Duttrow in Rome reacting there in real time to the news that Robert Francis Prevost, an American cardinal, has been named Pope.

He has taken the name Leo XIV. He is the first American pope. And minutes after he was named, he stepped to the microphone on the balcony above St. Peter's Square and greeted the church he now leads. La pace sia con tutti voi! Peace be with you all. Consider this. 1.4 billion Catholics have a new shepherd. Who is he, and where will he take them? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Consider This from NPR. My co-host Scott Detro has been in Rome this week talking to

Catholics about what they hoped for in a new pope, and talking to Vatican watchers about who they expected to be named pope. Well, now that we have one, I'm going to turn it over to Scott and the rest of NPR's team set up at the edge of St. Peter's Square. Scott spoke with NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose and with NPR's legendary longtime Rome correspondent Sylvia Paggioli. Sylvia, I will start with you, an American pope. It is totally amazing. I was totally flabbergasted. The possibility of an American pope had always been considered a taboo, given the immense

power of the United States, the superpower on the world stage, the geopolitical leader. And now here we are with the first American as head of the worldwide Catholic Church. It's also true that Robert Francis Prevost spent only about a third of his life in the United States. He spent some two decades in Peru and has been based here at the Vatican for several years now as head of the department that chooses and appoints bishops. He's had extensive international experience and Prevost is a polyglot. In his first words to the faithful, to the city, and to the world, he spoke mostly in Italian and then in Spanish with special greetings to the people of Peru where he spent so much of his lifetime.

Today in his first words as Pope he did not speak in English. I wonder if that was on purpose, a way of presenting himself as a citizen of the world without a specific national label. Jason, what do we know about Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo? Well, Robert Prevost is 69 years old. He was born and raised in Chicago. He has an undergraduate degree from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, and he majored in mathematics there, not in religion. He entered the Augustinian religious order, rising to the head of that order eventually. He has degrees in theology from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and then he

came to Rome to study at the Pontifical St. Thomas Aquinas University, where he received his doctorate in theology. He spent time working in Peru as a missionary, also as a pastor, as a bishop, as an archbishop. He's also taught, he's taught canon law, he's taught patristics, he's taught moral law at the Catholic seminary there, and he speaks, as Sylvia said, English, Spanish, and Italian, and teaches in all of those languages. He's also served at the Vatican in administration, working with clergy and bishops, very familiar with local bishops around the world. Part of his work was to vet nominations to become bishops, so we'll know a lot of people

in those local administrative areas around the world. Also served on the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, where he served as a missionary, and he has deep pastoral experience, missionary experience, teaching experience, administrative experience, really sort of the whole package and was a top advisor to Pope Francis.

And this was a big question going into this conclave. Would the church stay on the path that Pope Francis set for the past 12 years or turn back, revert, go in a different more traditional direction? This seems to be a big clue about what the Cardinals were thinking. Well, I think there was a fork in the road here. Conservatives were unhappy with the speed at which Francis moved on issues regarding, say, migrants or women or entering politics, LGBTQ issues. They said it caused confusion and disunity.

One of the biggest questions had been this. Did Francis go too far too quickly? Well, given provost's closeness to Francis, I think that the cardinals decided to go with someone in Francis' mold, though someone who might move at a slightly slower pace than Francis did, but still moving in that same direction. Liberals were worried that there would be a backlash against Francis and cardinals would choose to go in a more conservative direction, but Scott, that doesn't seem to have been

the case. Sylvia, a lot of attention on the name Leo, Pope Leo XIV. Tell us about the name Pope Leo in the Roman Catholic Church's history. How important this is. Well, the last Leo was Leo XIII, and he was known for his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum of New Things. In it, he outlined the rights of workers to fair wages, safe working conditions, and the creation of trade unions. The document also affirmed the right to own property, free enterprise, and it was opposed to both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.

Leo XIII was called the social pope, or the worker's pope, and he is really seen as the founder of the Catholic Church's social doctrine. So that's Leo XIII. Jason, what can we say at this moment about how Leo the 14th might be as pope? Well, I don't think we should predict, but we can know something about the way he worked as a pastor and bishop and archbishop, which might help us understand how he might be as a pope. I think he resembles Francis in his commitment to the poor and to migrants, though he has

been criticized for not doing enough to address clergy sexual abuse at the local level. And I think that's true, Scott, of many in church leadership around the world. He told the Vatican News Agency that a bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom, but rather a church leader who's called to authentically be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to talk with them, to walk with them. Francis might have even said to smell like them. I think that's very much in the Francis mold.

Also, as a cardinal, he had such broad international experience and experience here in Rome, I think he understands that while he might be from America, America is not the center of the world. He spent so much time in South America, specifically Peru, that would help him to really understand and bring the concerns of that region to the international stage. And a couple of areas that I think progressives might not be too pleased by are this. He's made some comments regarding LGBTQ issues. He's lamented what he's called the media's and the culture's sympathy with, quote, homosexual lifestyles.

He's also criticized the government of Peru when it wanted to teach gender in schools. And he called the promotion of, quote, gender ideology confusing because it creates the idea that genders don't exist. Jason, we talked about the question of sticking with Francis' path or going back in another direction. The other crossroad the church seems to face based on the interviews we all did was, did the cardinals want to elect an evangelist or a bureaucrat, somebody to spread the faith or somebody to keep the trains running on time?

What does this tell us? Well, I think he worked as a missionary. He worked as a pastor. He worked as a local bishop. He has significant experience in many areas. You know, at that local level of missionary work and parish work, he accompanied people in their daily religious lives in baptisms, in funerals, in marriages. He's used to preaching and teaching and caring for his flock.

But as a bishop, he's an administrator who worked at the regional level. As an archbishop, a larger administrator. He ran a religious order, that's more administrative experience. Also though, part of the Vatican Curia here, he worked to vet and appoint bishops. He has that very high level administrative experience. I think that he understands that working with

these complex Organizations like the curate in complex ways takes work. So really from the top to the bottom a lot of experience Sylvia an American has been elected pope and this has happened at a moment where America's role in the world is in a really delicate high-profile place The entire rest of the world is constantly reacting and responding to the Trump administration. It seems significant that the College of Cardinals would pick not just any American Pope, but somebody who seems to see the world very differently than the sitting American president. Very, very differently. The new pope follows very much the Francis legacy of, with primary

concern for migrants, refugees, and victims of war. That's a concern that the current American administration does not appear to share. In fact, one of the first comments I heard here in the crowd was that Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV and the first American pope, was chosen by his fellow cardinals as the Catholic Church's response to the US President Donald Trump and his administration's tough stance on immigration and many other issues. I think it'll be very interesting to see where the new Pope will travel first. Will he visit what his predecessor Pope Francis liked to call the peripheries?

I wonder what will be his first destination on the geopolitical stage. Jason DeRose, I'm going to ask both you and Sylvia this, but we're talking about all these things we think might be the case. We need to wait and see what happens when the Pope starts to act, starts to act publicly. What are your biggest questions going forward in these next few weeks about what Pope Leo is going to do, how he's going to focus. I wonder if he will continue the focus of the Francis papacy on migrants, on the poor, on the people who have the least control over their lives. I think that that is something Francis brought to the attention of the world when his first papal voyage was to an island sheltering refugees.

I will be very interested in seeing where he goes first and what some of his first words will be when he goes to those places. Does he visit a war zone? Does he visit refugees? Does he speak of and to and about women? All of those things will be, I will be looking for. Sylvia, any big questions that you have about how the Vatican could change under an American's leadership? Well, it will be very interesting to see. We talked many times about Francis having done so many new things, revolutionary reforms,

but there's some things he stopped short of in terms of the women deacons and the possibility of elder married men becoming clergy. We'll see. Will the new pope go further? Will he stop there? That's going to be one of the most interesting things in the future. Former NPR correspondent Sylvia Paggioli joined there by NPR's Jason DeRose speaking with my co-host Scott Detro from the edge of St. Peter's Square. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlem in Rome and by Connor Donovan. It was edited by Daniel Burke, Courtney Dornig, and Tinbeat Ermias.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.