The tumultuous and exhausting 12-year pontificate of the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio, better known to the world as Pope Francis, came to an end in April. Francis was a paradoxical pope if there ever was one. He openly promoted disruption in the Catholic Church, which he did not hesitate to call causing “a mess,” as if unclarity about doctrine and the Church’s moral teaching could somehow serve constructive purposes. He spoke endlessly of mercy and the Church as an immense, nonjudgmental “field hospital” for the lost and broken. But Pope Francis rarely called for the repentance that is the crucial prerequisite for the healing of the soul. He occasionally criticized abortion and gender ideology, and in no uncertain terms, even as he tolerated and promoted those inside and outside the Church who indulged these grave evils.

Francis repeatedly called for patient listening and an ill-defined “synodal Church,” even as he was far more autocratic than any of his immediate predecessors. He seemed to have more than a little sympathy for left-wing regimes and ideologies (think Marxist regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and China) that openly persecute his co-religionists. He oozed contempt for more traditional-minded Catholics—and especially adherents of the Traditional Latin Mass, the most faithful of the faithful—while tolerating rank heresy from a German Church in open rebellion against Rome, Christian orthodoxy, and the unchanging moral law. He promoted the kitschy, vulgar religious art of the serial sexual abuser Father Marko Rupnik, who specialized in seducing and abusing nuns in a crude and truly sacrilegious manner, and inexcusably protected him from prosecution right to the bitter end (something that thankfully seems to be coming to an end under Pope Leo XIV).

Promisingly, Francis occasionally warned about reducing the Christian Church to the status of an NGO. But he then endlessly opined as if he were the CEO of a predictably progressive NGO informed by equally predictable ideological clichés. The pope was prone to utopian effusions about world affairs, and acted as if support for open borders and peace at any price were prerequisites of the Christian faith. Some of his ecclesiastical boosters even bizarrely spoke about Francis having his own “magisterium” distinct from that of the historic Church. He had no obvious affection for Western civilization, and spoke not at all about the “dictatorship of relativism” that threatened it from within. He showed little or no realism about external threats to it, such as the one arising from militant Islam. In the manner of a woke-adjacent academic or intellectual, Francis saw Islam always and everywhere as a “religion of peace” (for a paradigmatic example, see the 2013 apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel). His Christian affirmation was humanitarian in emphasis and focus, and he was extremely reluctant to challenge the progressivist shibboleths of our age.

Many orthodox Catholics are relieved, and to some extent even elated, by what they’ve seen so far from the new pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the American-born Robert Prevost. Pope Leo compellingly speaks about the centrality of the crucified and risen Christ. His calls for unity in the Church suggest a desire to bring Catholics together, and not to side unilaterally with progressives against the tradition-minded. His manner and bearing are modest and far from autocratic and divisive. When he talks about “listening” he seems to mean it. He is unlikely to go wobbly on issues that directly affect the integrity of the moral law, or what eminent Catholic thinkers have called “the truth about man.” 

But one should not expect too much too quickly from the new pope. This Augustinian priest and bishop appears not to have imbibed the “Christian realism” that informs St. Augustine’s political reflection in The City of God. By no means an ideologue, Pope Leo nonetheless takes for granted the half-humanitarianism of more recent Catholic social teaching. His speeches and sermons condemn “inequality” and the “structural causes” of poverty without acknowledging the crucial distinction between the poor as a sociological category (sometimes envious, cruel, and rapacious) and the “poor in spirit,” who are indeed more open than others to the supreme anchor for the human heart and soul that is hope rooted in faith in the Living God (see “Pope Leo XIV’s Message for 9th World Day of the Poor”). The new pope seems inclined to accept the statist orientation of recent Catholic thought. But, crucially, he never contemns charity as a distraction from efforts at social transformation, and notes with emblematic clarity that “the gravest form of poverty is not to know God.”

Leo quotes Pope Francis in almost all his sermons and addresses, as if the Church somehow began anew, or at least underwent a paradigm shift, during Francis’s papacy that requires it to be the basis for all Catholic thought and action moving forward. That is ill-advised, to say the least.

One hopes that as Pope Leo moves forward, he will begin to more explicitly draw on the wisdom of his great predecessors, including the Polish Pope John Paul II (pope from 1978 to 2005) and the German Pope Benedict XVI (pope from 2005 to 2013). They forthrightly challenged the Zeitgeist rather than succumbing to it, while vigorously defending the moral foundations of democracy against what C. S. Lewis suggestively called “the poison of subjectivism.” In 2005, Pope Benedict gave a name to the secular religion posing as the culmination or perfection of democratic modernity, strikingly calling it “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s ego and desires.” Neither the Christian religion nor what is left of Western civilization will survive, he warned, if modern man loses the capacity “by which to distinguish the true from the false, and desire from truth.”

Benedict also pointedly warned Christians, and men and women of goodwill more broadly, about being led astray by dangerous ideological winds which have flung late modern man “from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth.” In his 2006 Regensburg Address, Benedict argued for the “providential” character of the Christian religion’s encounter with Europe, and henceforth the West more broadly, invoking the vision that St. Paul had of a man from Macedonia beckoning him to come to the aid of the people there (Acts 16:9-10). Benedict defended the rationality of the Christian faith and its rooting in the creative Logos of God himself, warning against the “dehellenization” of a religion rooted inseparably in faith and reason. He famously cautioned against violence in religion, as seen in many currents of Islam, and refused any identification of religious faith with nominalism, fideism, or the subjectivistic or fundamentalist rejection of reason.

Benedict also forthrightly opposed the reduction of Christianity to secular humanitarianism and refused the identification of reason with a positivism and scientism that ignored the “self-limitation” that is proper to reason itself. Pope Leo XIV will need to draw on these strands as he moves forward with a promised reflection on the dangers that artificial intelligence poses to the integrity of the human person made in the image and likeness of God. Such a text cannot primarily address the social or economic consequences of AI. To be sure, these are as important as the social questions addressed by Pope Leo XIII in his classic 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. The soul and its relationship to God must be at the heart of any authentically Christian engagement with the promises and perils of late modernity. One surely hopes and expects that Pope Leo will rise to the occasion. The fact he has discerned the centrality of this issue, rather than just repeating the highly charged ecological bromides of his immediate predecessor, gives one good reason for hope.

As he prepares to confront the most consequential challenges of our time, Pope Leo should meditate on the fact that Christianity and the concept of ordered liberty that birthed Western civilization—and the American Founding in its best and fullest articulation—stand or fall with the recovery of right reason and the moral law as understood by the Great Tradition. As we shall make clear in part II, the new pope should look to Pope John Paul II, who had a special fondness for the American political order. He saw in the American Founding a sane and sound understanding of the dependence of democracy upon wisdom, virtue, and self-restraint. As Pope John Paul II noted in remarks during a Mass at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport in 1995, he discerned in our founding documents a true deference to “unchanging principles of the natural law whose permanent truth and validity can be known by reason, for it is law written by God in human hearts.”