Fans donned Pope Leo XIV jerseys outside Rate Field baseball stadium in Chicago May 11 before a game between the Chicago White Sox and the Miami Marlins. Days earlier, the Chicago-born pontiff was elected the first American pope in history. (Lola Gomez / CNS)
View from the pew
Just as a dark force loose in our corner of the world preaches that diversity, equity and inclusiveness are wrong and works to forcibly delete such welcoming acceptance from our culture as well as our conscience, we welcome a new voice to counter that most uncharitable, un-Christian political ideology.
It’s not just members of the Catholic Church who embrace and celebrate our new leader, a pastor and missionary whose life work has involved seeking and embracing strangers and outsiders.
We Americans rejoice that Pope Leo XIV is our own compatriot — now that we are over the shock of an American actually being selected.
We are in company with people around the world who, as they learn about former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, find hope that he will be a voice for peace and mutual respect in a world woefully lacking in both.
“This missionary pope is a symbol for us to also go out to all the world and preach the Good News,” Honolulu Bishop Larry Silva told the crowd at a May 12 Mass celebrating the new pope, who was chosen May 8 by a conclave of cardinals in an ancient voting ritual at the Vatican. “It’s not because he is an American that we are celebrating, but because he has a lot of pastoral experience throughout the world.”
In an interview with Hawaii Public Radio before the Mass, Bishop Silva said, “I would hope that he would help us find concrete ways to reach out to those who do not know Jesus yet and to come to know him and to love him, and to know how much he loves them and to come into the church and experience his presence, especially in the Eucharist.”
Hard-working and humble
My personal joy about our pope is that he comes from the Midwest, as do I. We people from the middle of America have a belief about ourselves as common, hard-working folk who value being good neighbors and citizens.
It’s much like Hawaii residents who believe that only they embody, understand and embrace the “aloha spirit.”
Most Midwesterners are proud descendants of immigrants who came to the United States at a time when new people were welcomed, to become the farmers who feed the nation, the workforce in a manufacturing boom in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
I’m the descendant of Polish immigrants who fled a country governed and partitioned by conquering countries, and Irish refugees leaving a country ruled by English oppressors for three centuries.
Pope Leo XIV’s genealogy includes French and Spanish ancestors, as well as a great-great-grandmother identified as Creole or “a free person of color” from records dating back to the 1840s. The racial identification system unique to formerly French-ruled Louisiana was left behind when the family moved to Chicago.
The pope’s remote Black racial roots have been reported in many news sources. In a Forbes magazine article, the pope’s brother, John Prevost, confirmed family records revealed by a genealogist with the Historic New Orleans Collection, a research center documenting that city’s history.
I confess that I got a bit giddy when we learned on the early-morning network feed from St. Peter’s Square that this pope is from Chicago. Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, author and an editor of America magazine, was one of the people corralled by ABC News to provide background and insight about whoever it would be that emerged from the Vatican balcony.
I took notes as Father Martin, who knew the former cardinal as “Bob,” described him: “I know him to be a kind, open, humble, modest, decisive, hard-working, trustworthy, down-to-earth man.”
When we heard the name which Cardinal Prevost chose to be called, Father Martin reflected on its significance, following in the footsteps of the last pope by that name.
Pope Leo XIII famously brought the teaching of Jesus into the 20th century as Catholic social justice. The social teaching is to recognize the God-given dignity of each person; help and shelter outcasts and marginalized people; and support working people and their right to be paid and not exploited.
That inspiring information made it a morning of exciting news that was all smiles and hope, but my attention could not help but drift into shadows. What a time in the United States to be talking about social justice, human dignity, sheltering, helping, supporting and welcoming all those other people.
How can? There is not much of those themes to be found in the news headlines these days.
The pope’s first words to the crowd, “Peace be with you,” echoed the first words the apostles heard from the risen Jesus when he appeared in their midst.
“If only it would be,” I thought. But then I turned off that dimmer button in my brain and listened.
I got a little giddy as the day went by. It was the fault of another “talking head” who babbled facts about Chicago once we learned that it’s the pope’s hometown.
I don’t know the TV babbler’s name, but he led me astray. He said the pope was born on the South Side (not the posh neighborhoods) of Chicago and was a fan of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
Woo-hoo! I started a chain of texting in family and friend circles sharing that most important fact about the new pope. My dad was a fan of the Cubs and I have memories of keeping quiet as a kid while ballgames droned on the radio. We have generations of diehard fans of the team, which is not famous for being the greatest of all time.
Well, everyone has since learned from more reliable sources that Pope Leo XIV is a Chicago White Sox fan. They are also not one of the winningest teams; did I mention we Midwesterners are loyal and stalwart in the face of disappointment? Also, hopefully, forgiving of others who do not share our views.
‘Least American’ cardinal
But seriously, many people around the world applauded the new pope as the “least American” of proposed U.S. candidates. He spent decades as a missionary in Peru, where he became a bishop. He was one of the late Pope Francis’ appointees as cardinal and was later called by Francis to take a position at the Vatican for the past two years as head of the department that vets and helps decide on who will be appointed bishops around the world.
“Prevost’s cosmopolitan biography … along with the Trump administration’s abandonment of the postwar global order, complicates the notion of what an ‘American pope’ means for the church and the world,” wrote the editors of Commonweal magazine in a May 14 editorial.
“Is Leo’s election a welcome thumb in the eye of Donald Trump, whose policies and priorities are so often at odds with Christian teaching? Is Leo a ‘woke Marxist puppet’ sent to undermine American values? Questions like these have driven discussion of Leo XIV in the United States,” wrote the editors of the independent liberal Catholic monthly whose content is on its website.
“It’s a symptom of American narcissism that we believe the election of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to be all about us. Catholic doctrine, as many rightly point out, does not map neatly onto American partisan politics. The College of Cardinals, guided by the Holy Spirit, did not make their decision based on the president’s latest moral offense or the vice president’s travesties of Catholic doctrine.
“Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., said after Leo’s election that the conclave was ‘not a continuation of the American election’ but was driven by ‘a desire to strengthen the Christian faith among God’s people.’”
The editors of the oldest Catholic magazine in America said that “Leo will no doubt confound the hopes of some and defy the expectations of others. Which is just as it should be: The pope is the leader of all Catholics.”
In his first homily, Pope Leo XIV said to the cardinal conclave: “God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles, and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator for the sake of the entire mystical body of Christ.”
