Elected last week, much has been made of Leo’s American heritage. He is Chicago born, a baseball fan of the city’s less popular south side team, the White Sox. He is a graduate of Villanova, the Catholic university in Philadelphia.
But Leo has spent most of his adult life outside the U.S., working as a missionary in Peru and in several roles at the Vatican in Rome. He holds dual citizenship with the U.S. and Italy.
His rise to pope comes at a time of confusion or discontentment for many of an estimated 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide who disagreed with controversial social positions or reforms within the church under Pope Francis. Topics ranged from homosexuality to gender confusion to climate and immigration and many more.
“There’s a growing group of Catholics who wonder whether or not Catholicism, as Roman Catholics understand it, will survive unless there is a return to some of the more—dare we use the words—conservative and traditional views,” Gino Geraci, pastor emeritus at Calvary South Denver, said on American Family Radio Monday.
“The most important big idea is how will this pope work in reinforcing the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church versus how many concessions will he make to Francis' trajectory away from … dare we use the words conservatism or traditionalism,” Geraci told show host Jenna Ellis.
Francis permitted discussion for ordaining married men in remote regions where there weren’t enough priests to properly serve the population, but he didn’t actually approve their ordination.
He also entertained the idea of ordaining women as deacons, even setting up a commission to study the possibility, but he didn’t follow through on the idea.
Francis did, however, allow priests to offer the Eucharist, the Catholic sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, to divorced and remarried Catholics.
Francis did not change the church’s definition of marriage but did allow for the blessing of gay couples which seemed to offer approval of gay marriage.
“It’s my understanding that this pope in the past as both a bishop and archbishop has written on the issue of the created order, and that he seems to be firmer on the subject of the created order,” Geraci said, adding that he sees some influence of “liberation theology” with Leo.
Impact of missionary days
Prevost was a missionary and that will weigh heavily on his agenda, Geraci predicted.
“He wants to retain all of the biblical issues of, ‘Hey, you should care for the least and the last among you,’ but also you don't have to abandon the biblical revelation of the created order in order to affirm what the Bible has to say about loving, caring, and compassionate commitment to the poor.”
One of the most striking differences between Leo and Francis will be Leo’s much more careful use of language, Frank Pavone, founder of Priests for Life, told Ellis.
Leo is much less likely to send tremors through the Church with the after-effects of an off-the-cuff remark.
“One of the biggest problems was how careless Pope Francis was with his words,” Pavone said.
“He would say something on the plane to a reporter, a topic, by the way, that was usually instigated by the reporter, not by him, and a comment would cause all kinds of distress and division, yet if you pressed the Vatican about, ‘Well, is he changing Church teaching on this or that point?’ Of course, they would say, ‘No, no, he's not.’ But the damage is already done. The confusion is already unleashed,” Pavone said.
Leo, in very limited time before the public so far, has already demonstrated a much more disciplined approach to messaging.
“You saw that in the speech he gave from the balcony when he first came out to greet the world. There were no wasted words, no careless words, no silly words,” Pavone said.
And the subject matter was spot on.
The 'only and only Savior'
“I think we’re going to see a pope here who puts the focus where it belongs, on the person of Jesus Christ, the one savior. This pope emphasizes unity, but the unity is not, ‘oh let’s compromise this, let’s water down that, let’s find the least common denominator.’ It’s not about that. It’s about the one and only Savior, Jesus Christ,” Pavone said.
That focus could be a striking difference between Leo and Francis and could bring calm and confidence to Catholics sometimes rattled by a lack of clarity from Francis.
“If you pressed Pope Francis on is marriage between one man and one woman? Yes, absolutely. Are there more than two genders? No, absolutely not. Yet he gave signals. He gave winks and nods. He gave sound bites and snapshots that led in the opposite direction. We have to reject that nonsense. It's garbage,” Pavone said.
Leo through the years has been very clear on the topics of gender and homosexuality, and “he’s going to stick to that,” Pavone said.
