There’s a natural inclination to put Catholic clergy, and particularly a new pope, in an ideological box. Some of those boxes do mean a great deal: There are contested questions of dogma, doctrine, liturgy, and pastoral practice within the church on which there are opposing poles. But even aside from the many parts of a pope’s jobs that are only indirectly connected to those internal divides, there’s another reason why it can be unduly reductive to classify clergy on a political spectrum. We should bear that in mind in assessing Pope Leo XIV, not only as he enters office but as he carries it out.

That reason is this: Christianity calls all of its adherents in both liberal and conservative directions. That doesn’t mean that a faithful Christian can’t be a consistent ideological conservative. It does mean that our instincts in one direction or the other must be tempered by the call of Christ.

Let’s face it: Even prior to learning our politics, most of us naturally incline as a tendency in either the conservative or the liberal direction. The conservative impulse leans toward respect for rules and their enforcement, adherence to tradition, respect for hierarchies, and desire for public order. The liberal impulse leans toward charity, mercy, forgiveness, and tolerance. Most of us share both sets of impulses, but most lean by nature more in one direction than the other. That helps explain why one finds right-wing and left-wing politics pretty much everywhere there is politics, even when its content is quite varied.

Christian, and especially Catholic, teachings pull in both directions. Catholicism is in some ways deeply conservative. It is full of rules, order, and hierarchy. It grounds its claims to theological authority in tradition — in the unchanging succession dating back to Jesus giving St. Peter and the Apostles the Great Commission. Its doctrines are famously resistant to change, and it preaches a sexual ethic that was as out of step with more permissive contemporary mores in the time of Jesus as it is today. It is a continual target for modern progressives. It teaches that public tolerance of the sin itself is the further sin of scandal. And yet, the very basis of Christianity is the forgiveness of sins on a basis that is an absolute amnesty, not at all proportional. Some of the more challenging parables in the Gospels involve people not getting what they deserve, but what has been given by grace. The church’s individual and social teachings stress mercy, charity, loving the sinner even while hating the sin, and breaking down every sort of barrier between people.

As a result, a genuinely good Christian, and a genuinely good churchman, must be pulled in both directions, be comfortable with contradictory impulses, and recognize that different teachings of the church are harder for different people. A truly devout priest will be coded, as we say today, as both a right-winger and a left-winger depending upon the setting, the topic, the audience, and the moment — even while being entirely consistent. And so, if a priest never makes us uncomfortable with our own impulses, he’s probably not doing his entire job.