After a quiet start, it seems that the first American pope is beginning to find his voice.
During his first foreign trip to Türkiye and Lebanon, Pope Leo XIV expected the papacy to be more cautious and less polarizing than his predecessor, the late Pope Francis.
But many Vatican watchers were impressed by his ability to deliver strong messages — especially on issues such as climate change, artificial intelligence, poverty and immigration — albeit in a more nuanced manner than the man he replaced.
“Pope Leo is certainly evolving in this role,” said Massimo Fagioli, a world-leading Vatican expert and professor at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland. “He resisted the temptation to give a sound bite that could easily be used as a headline” but “when he speaks, he says very brave things.”
Despite all the warm reviews, some Vatican watchers have sounded a note of caution: Leo has yet to take specific positions, let alone sharp criticisms, on any major issue. Doing so would almost certainly mean frustrating at least one of the factions in this church of 1.4 billion people, which he has so brilliantly kept on his side.
Leo, 70, grew up in Chicago and spent most of his working life in Peru before he was surprisingly chosen as pope in the conclave held in April after Francis’ death. Fagioli said his infrequent appearance meant he was “a bit of a mystery” to many Catholics, and he enjoyed a “very quiet summer” of study and preparation.
That began to change as the colder months arrived, with more frank comments, including his call last month for “deep thought” about the treatment of immigrants in US detention.
On Tuesday, as he celebrated a Mass in Beirut, attended by an estimated 150,000 people, Leo fulfilled a promise made by Francis, who was barred from visiting due to illness late in his life.
Liu asked God for the gift of peace for this beloved land, marked by instability, wars and suffering, likely referring to the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, the fallout from the massive port-side explosion in 2020 that killed more than 200 people, and the country’s deepening economic crisis.
Although more than half of Lebanon’s population is Muslim, nearly a third are Christians and 5% are Catholic, according to 2022 census data. Before Lebanon, Leo visited Turkey to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Nicene Creed, the standard statement of what all Christians — Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox — believe, including the affirmation that Jesus is the Son of God.
This highlighted one of the themes of the six-day trip, which was engagement “with other Christian groups, but also with the government of Turkey and, by extension, with Muslims,” according to Miles Pattenden, a historian of the Catholic Church who teaches at Oxford University.
This is just one of the ways Leo followed Francis’s relatively progressive policies and views — “but he did it with a completely different tone and in a different way,” Pattenden said.
Pattenden added that although both men have warned of the dangers associated with artificial intelligence, the tech-savvy Leo is the first pope who “seems comfortable with the modern world” and popular culture.
Pattenden said its down-to-earth atmosphere makes his papacy feel like “a sitcom in which some nice nerd from Midwestern America suddenly finds out he’s become pope.” “He has this smile that suggests he himself can’t quite believe it.”
Leo is known to read his speeches word for word, a radical departure from Francis’ habit of going off-script. This led to several high-profile mistakes that sent his assistants into damage control mode.
“Their gestures and communication are similar,” said Stan Chu Ilo, a professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago. “But it is quite clear that Pope Francis was sociable and outgoing by nature, while the reserved Pope Leo seems to be a very effective communicator and has clarity of thought.”
Even when he stuck to his lines, Francis’ pointed and pointed statements led to clashes with other world officials, such as when he challenged the United States on climate change and called for an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
Liu said he supports a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian territories, but told reporters on the plane heading to Lebanon: “We are friends of Israel.”
“Leo spoke and acted very carefully, as if each sentence had been carefully weighed and formulated, to avoid misunderstanding or outright statement,” Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute, said during his trip this week.
The new pope has been well received by many in Lebanon, a country that is still being bombed by Israel. Just a week before Liu arrived in Beirut, an Israeli air strike on the city killed Haitham Ali Tabatabai, a senior Hezbollah commander, and four other people, and wounded 28 others.
“We believe he will bring us peace, love and hope,” said Pascal Azaz, a nurse who was monitoring Leo’s speech near Beirut’s sparkling waterfront on Tuesday, the final day of his trip. “We’ve been waiting for this day for years.”
Nearby, Musa Abdel Dayem, a yoga instructor, said he hoped the pope would inspire us “to live in a more peaceful way” in a country where “everyone is angry” about the escalating crises plaguing his country.
They’re not the only ones impressed by Liu’s approach. His centrist stance appears to have calmed divisions between Catholic liberals and conservatives, some of the latter angered by what they saw as Francis’ abandonment of liturgical traditions such as the Latin Mass.
However, occupying such a middle ground is not without risks.
The closest Liu came to criticizing or condemning anyone or anything was to make “a sincere appeal to those who hold political and social power, here and in all countries marked by war and violence.”
He said to them: “Listen to the cries of your people who call for peace!”