Report from Rome: Leo XIV, First Impressions

Last evening, I was present just outside St. Peter's Square for the first blessing of Pope Leo XIV, the former Augustinian Cardinal, Robert Prevost. Providentially, my wife Peggy and I just happen to be in Rome visiting my eldest son's family now located here.

Around 7:00 Peggy had phoned me with news of seeing white smoke from the Vatican chimney. That traditional signal indicated the successful completion of Papal Conclave deliberations. Earlier in the day, the two of us had been together in St. Peter's Square when black smoke revealed an inconclusive result of that morning's process.

So, I raced off walking as fast as I could toward the Via Conciliazione, the long wide avenue extending from the papal basilica. My five years living and studying in Rome (1967-1972) told me that a huge overflow crowd would gather there spilling over from St. Peter's Square and awaiting the introduction of the new pope.

Forty minutes later, I arrived just in time to hear and (barely) see him.

I could hardly believe my ears.

Imagine: a second consecutive American pope! And this one from the United States as successor to the first American pope, Argentina's Pope Francis! Not only that, but the new man also turns out to be a fellow Chicagoan. Like me as well, he entered the seminary as a 14-year-old intent already at that tender age on becoming a priest. I felt I knew him. (I also found myself wondering, could he also be a Cub fan? Probably not though. Prevost is a South-Sider which probably aligns him with the White Sox.)

More seriously, I wondered what could the cardinal electors have been thinking in selecting someone like Prevost - a dual citizen of the U.S. and Peru? And what could Prevost himself be signaling in choosing Leo XIV as his papal name? I also wondered what Leo's election might portend for the Catholic Church and the world.

Along those lines, let me share some initial impressions.

The Significance of Prevost's Election

Regardless of the Cardinal electors' intentions, I find it noteworthy that the last two papal elections have shifted church focus from Europe to the Americas. They have directed attention away from the colonizers to the colonized in the case of Francis, and from the oppressed to the oppressors with Leo.

Could the cardinals' appointment of Prevost be making a forceful statement about such dynamic?

I mean Francis was a product of United States' oppression. Argentina's U.S.-supported "dirty war," led to the deaths and forced disappearances of more than 30,000 Argentinians. Whether by specific intention or by direction of the Holy Spirit, Francis' election called attention to such tyranny over the Global South by an imperialistic United States.

Yes, Argentina's Guerra Sucia (1974-'83) was the bloody expression of what Noam Chomsky and others identify as a more general U.S. war against the Catholic Church in Latin America. The conflict was sparked by implementation there of Catholic Church teachings on social justice and by the emergence of liberation theology, which Washington long considered and treated as a threat to national security.

With that in mind, the college of cardinals might be suggesting that new pope's trajectory embodies the response Catholics should take to the United States' cruel history of violence in what it has long considered its "backyard."

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