After a quiet start, the first American pope appears to be finding his voice.
During his first trip abroad to Türkiye and Lebanon, Pope Leo XIV projected a more cautious and less polarizing papal brand than that of his predecessor, the late Pope Francis.
However, many Vatican watchers have been impressed by his ability to convey powerful messages, particularly on issues such as climate change, artificial intelligence, poverty and immigration, albeit in a more subtle way than the man he replaced.
“Pope Leo is certainly growing in his role,” said Massimo Faggioli, a world expert on the Vatican and professor at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. “He’s resisted the temptation to give a clip that’s easy to use as a headline,” but “when he talks, he says things that are pretty brave.”
For all the warm criticism, some Vatican watchers have sounded a note of caution: Leo has yet to define concrete positions, let alone sharp criticism, on any major issue. Doing so will almost certainly mean disappointing at least one faction of this 1.4 billion-strong church that he has so skillfully kept on his side.
Raised in Chicago, Leo, 70, spent much of his working life in Peru, before being a surprise choice for pope at the April conclave following Francis’ death. His lower profile meant he “was a mystery” to many Catholics, and he had “a very quiet summer” of study and preparation, Faggioli said.
That began to change as the colder months approached, with more outspoken comments, including his call last month for “deep reflection” on the treatment of immigrants detained in the United States.
On Tuesday, while celebrating a mass in Beirut, attended by some 150,000 people, Leo fulfilled a promise made by Francis, whose late illness prevented him from visiting him.
Leo asked “God for the gift of peace for this beloved land, marked by instability, wars and suffering,” likely in reference to the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, the aftermath of a colossal port explosion in 2020 that killed more than 200 people, and the country’s turbulent economic crisis.
Although more than half of the Lebanese population is Muslim, almost a third is Christian and 5% Catholic, according to 2022 census data. Before Lebanon, León visited Turkey to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the Nicene Creed, the standard statement of what all Christians (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) believe, including the claim that Jesus was the son of God.
That highlighted one of the themes of the six-day trip, which was to reach out “both to other Christian groups, but also to the government of Turkey and, by extension, to Muslims,” according to Miles Pattenden, a historian of the Catholic Church who teaches at the University of Oxford.
That’s just one way Leo has followed Francis’s relatively progressive policies and views, “but he’s done it with a very different tone and in a different way,” Pattenden said.
Although both men warned against the risks associated with AI, Leo, a tech expert, is the first pontiff “who seems comfortable with the modern world” and pop culture, Pattenden added.
His down-to-earth vibe makes his papacy seem like “a sitcom in which a nice geek from the American Midwest suddenly discovers he’s become Pope,” Pattenden said. “He has a smile that suggests he can’t believe it himself.”
Leo is known to read his speeches word for word, a drastic departure from Francisco’s habit of going off script. That led to several high-profile missteps that sent his aides into damage-limitation mode.
“Their gestures and their reach are similar,” said Stan Chu Ilo, a professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago. “But Pope Francis was evidently of a gregarious and outgoing nature, while the reserved Pope Leo seems quite effective in communication and has clarity in his thinking.”
Even when he stuck to his lines, Francis’ direct and specific pronouncements led to clashes with other world officials, such as when he challenged the United States on climate change and called for an investigation into whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
Leo has said he supports the two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian territories, but told reporters on the plane to Lebanon that “we are friends of Israel.”
During his trip this week, Leo “spoke and acted very carefully, as if each phrase had been carefully weighted and coined, to avoid misunderstandings or forceful statements,” said Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute.
And the new pope was welcomed by many in Lebanon, a country still being bombed by Israel. Just a week before Leo landed in Beirut, an Israeli airstrike on the city killed Haytham Ali Tabatabai, a senior Hezbollah commander, and four others, and wounded 28 others.
“We believe he will bring us peace, love and hope,” said Pascale Azaz, a nurse who watched Leo’s speech along Beirut’s sparkling waterfront on Tuesday, the last day of her trip. “We’ve been waiting for this day for years.”
Nearby, Moussa Abdayem, a yoga instructor, said he hoped the pope would “inspire us to live in a more peaceful way” in a country where “everyone is angry” about the crises plaguing their nation.
They’re not the only ones impressed by Leo’s approach. His centrist stance appears to have calmed divisions between liberal and conservative Catholics, some of the latter angered by what they saw as Francis’s abandonment of liturgical traditions such as the Latin mass.
However, occupying that middle ground is not without risks.
The closest Leo came to criticizing or censoring someone or something was making “a sincere appeal to those who hold political and social authority, here and in all countries marked by war and violence.”
He told them: “Listen to the cry of your people who cry out for peace!”
