This piece was written by Professor Anna Rowlands, Chair of CCSTP, and originally published by Australian broadcasters, ABC.net.
Image credit: Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The Roman sun had just hit that level where you can no longer see the far horizon when Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — stepped out onto the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica.
From my place at the back of the expectant crowd, on tiptoes to see above the raised mobile phones that filter all our gazes these days, we squinted, hands raised to shield our eyes, eventually accepting our ears would have to do the work our eyes could not. Unmatchable and unforgettable though the mood in that crowd was, we would probably have seen more had we been watching our screens.
If you weren’t near a huge screen in the square, you had mainly the ethereal vision of the dome of St Peter’s framed by light, and a voice. That voice, strong and clear — an immediate contrast to the thinness and vulnerability Francis’s voice of late — proclaimed to a joyous crowd a vision of a papacy that would serve the peace, dignity of all peoples and the whole earth, and that would place the proclamation of Christ, with confidence and through closeness to God’s people, especially amid realities of suffering, at its heart. In an age of new crucifixions, this pope preached the promise of resurrection.
In the tears, cheers and embraces in the crowd that greeted his words from those of every nationality standing around me, there was, for many minutes, a mood of such joy and celebration as to make one realise, like the administration of an electric shock, with what chronic desolation so much of our lives are currently lived.
Dressed like Benedict XVI and speaking like Francis, Leo did what Catholics do. He threaded the tradition. He spoke of evangelisation like John Paul II, and he received and owned Francis’s synodality as the name for conciliar reform appropriate to our times. He made clear that nothing good of his predecessors would be lost, but also that God sings his song anew.
The pope said Leo was a name chosen for “different reasons”, but chief among them was the desire to proclaim for a new post-industrial age the joys and challenges of being human beings who labour, who work to secure for ourselves the material and moral goods that make our lives decent and worthy. AI, digital revolutions, new forms of unemployment, new forms of suffering in spirit, body and mind, the weaponisation of “truth” and information, the brokenness of human communication, unceasing human conflict, have all been mentioned in the first four days of this papacy as the rerum novarum, the “new things, of 2025..
Peace begins at home. In his first address and later in his first meeting with the cardinals, Leo told them that he would walk with them, and he seems to be intent on leading them to walk with each other.
If Francis had one failing, in my own experience, it was that he seemed to fail to bring his own cardinals and bishops with him — and sometimes it seemed that he was in such a hurry that he knew he could not, and so he hoped that time might grant him forgiveness for pressing on ahead. That task of becoming a more synodal papacy would be part of the next step taken not by him, but by the man he had so suddenly moved to Rome and made cardinal less than two years ago.
Francis spoke about walking at the front and at the back of the flock, yet he met with the cardinals as a group only once during his pontificate in a substantial act of common discernment. By contrast, on Saturday morning, Leo used his time with his cardinals to get them to talk to each other as well as listen to him, and to speak to him in dialogue. This moment, behind closed doors, could prove one of the most significant early signs of the direction of his pontificate. It seems that Leo knows his task will be to operate as a synodal pope if he wishes to preach this message to the church, for the sake of its continued conversion in mission.
An American-born pope with Peruvian nationality, a linguistic polyglot, a lawyer, mathematician and theologian — and apparently a pretty good Wordle player — Leo XIV is a bridge between worlds. At a moment when we are determined to retreat behind walls of so many kinds, he promises to be a bridge-builder.
He is not, however, the charismatic Francis, forever ad libbing and drawing his energy from the crowd. He is, by all accounts, gentle, calm, thoughtful, a unifier but also firm and decisive. His words are scripted and he offers, as yet, little of his own story or a sense of personal emotion, although his words are passionate.
His homily on Friday the Sistine Chapel suggested a kenotic style of leadership, an emptying of self into the office which is both cross and blessing. This style, if it endures, will perhaps be balm for some and not for others, just as happened with his predecessors. But grace perfects nature, and his peaceable nature on a fractious international stage could very well be the gift our age now needs.
As the first pope from the Order of St Augustine — although five others, I believe, followed an Augustinian rule — Leo quoted Augustine’s famous line to the crowd: “for you I am a bishop, with you I am a Christian”. But it is worth quoting in a slightly extended form the context of that quote, which finds its way also into the documents of the Second Vatican Council:
What I am for you terrifies me; what I am with you consoles me. For you I am a bishop, but with you I am a Christian. The former is a duty; the latter a grace. The former is a danger; the latter salvation.
May Pope Leo XIV be granted the peace of the resurrection he so ably preaches.
Read the full article, including contributions from Austen Iverleigh, Susan Pascoe, Clare Johnson and many others.