Pope Leo XIV: Who is he, really?

Pope Leo XIV gave a speech on October 23, to participants in the World Meeting of Popular Movements, and with it brought a central question (back) into sharp focus: Who really is Leo XIV?

It’s a question pretty much everyone has had, petty much right from the beginning of his still-very-young pontificate, and it is more than fair to say that Leo’s remarks on the occasion made him sound a good deal like his controversial predecessor.

The address to the popular movements was, in every way, reminiscent of a speech by Pope Francis. All the South American Pope’s strong points were there, from the idea that the center is best seen from the peripheries to the Church’s support for the popular movements’ struggles for land, housing, and jobs, to the exaltation of the grassroots movements’ pursuit of bottom-up solutions, because solutions cannot be the prerogative of the elites.

This is the second time in the last month that Leo XIV has sounded like Pope Francis. The first time was with the publication of Dilexi Te, another exhortation, typically “Franciscan” in tone and approach. On that occasion, however, Leo XIV had made it clear that he had inherited a project from his predecessor and that everything needed to be adapted to a different climate, environment, and education.

In the case of the speech to the popular movements, however, the remarks were Leo XIV’s —or at least his ghostwriters’ —who increasingly pepper their speeches with quotes from Pope Francis. Whoever wrote the speech, however, had it approved and read by the Pope, and therefore, one must take it that Leo XIV agreed with its content and tone.

The fact is that the address to the popular movements is at once in continuity and in contradiction with what has been the pontificate of Leo XIV up to now.

In addressing the popular movements, Leo XIV chose to address a unique South American world, which some have summarized as “the Social Forum brought to the Vatican.” He did so from the perspective of a missionary bishop in South America. Still, he also embraced those struggles, reclaiming the original culture of the peoples who engaged in popular movements.

Sending a message to the networks of indigenous peoples and to theologians of indigenous theology last October 14, Leo XIV had indeed asserted the importance of original cultures. Still, he had also underlined that “all our historical, social, psychological or methodological discernment finds its ultimate meaning in the supreme mandate to make Jesus Christ known.”

A reference to Christ is missing from the speeches to popular movements, which is interesting because Leo XIV consistently reiterated Christ’s centrality in his own writings and off script remarks – see his dialogue with participants in the Jubilee of Synodal Equipes, for instance. Reference is made to the civilization of love desired by Jesus, but this civilization of love seems to have a particularly social, rather than a real, construction.

Obviously, the speech to the popular movements has awakened those who seek at all costs a continuity between Pope Francis and Leo XIV. Immediately, they were quick to take the remarks to popular movements as incontrovertible evidence of perfect continuity, and to insist that the people noting a real difference between Pope Francis and Leo XIV have mistaken at least the new man.

Yet the discontinuities are all there, in the symbols consistently denied during Francis’s pontificate, from the red mozzetta Leo XIV wore from the first time he appeared on the Loggia delle Benedizioni to the state ceremonial accepted and implemented during his visit to the Quirinale—the residence of the President of the Italian Republic—last October 14.

At the Quirinal, Leo XIV had also used the title of Primate of Italy, while in the book Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the Twenty-First Century, he had also given a different definition of synodality, which demonstrates that Leo does not intend to adopt all the structures and schemes put in place by Pope Francis regarding synodal issues.

Who, then, is Leo XIV really?

Is he the Western Pope who is aware of the symbols and who lives the doctrine of the Church according to tradition? Or is he the successor to Francis, somehow influenced by his experience as a missionary bishop in Latin America, whose themes and problems he understands very well? Is Leo XIV the Pope who puts Christ at the center or the Pope who reaffirms his support for popular movements without mentioning Christ?

Here, it is worth making a parenthesis, a digression.

At the beginning of Francis’s pontificate, he inherited the tradition that, at each meeting with the bishops during their ad limina visits, the Pope would deliver an address, usually prepared by the Secretariat of State. In 2015, during the German bishops’ ad limina, Pope Francis delivered his prepared address, which was published by the Holy See Press Office, as is customary. The address contained a harsh invective against the German Church, including an emphasis on the loss of faithful.

Pope Francis did not want to attack the German Church head-on. The 2021-2024 synodal process itself was in an important sense Pope Francis’s response to the Synodal Way of the People of God in Germany. Francis likely believed that placing the Church in a permanent state of synod would absorb German progressive outbursts.

He was wrong.

The result of that situation, however, was that Francis decided to stop preparing any speeches. He held only closed-door meetings with the bishops, speaking to everyone, thus avoiding texts that, drafted outside his circle of loyal followers, might betray his own thinking.

Leo XIV continues – so far – to work with the structure that preceded him, with the same ghostwriters as Pope Francis, with a world that, today, does not want to take a step back, because any step backward would mean a truncation if not a betrayal of the work they have advanced.

Leo doesn’t yet have his own team of writers. He doesn’t have a team yet, not really. It’s easy for the Pope, faced with so many issues, to simply rely on a written text, either with or without checking or editing it first.

The initial question remains: Who is Leo XIV, really? Government decisions have not yet defined him—only one dicastery head has been chosen, Bishop Filippo Iannone, who succeeded him at the Dicastery of Bishops—while the honeymoon with the media seems at risk every time the Pope speaks extemporaneously.

Leo XIV is a new-generation pope, but sometimes he finds himself thinking like the older generation. What will Leo XIV do to have his own team, including those who write his speeches?

That is the question.