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“May peace be with you.”
That was the first sentence uttered by Pope Leo XIV after he was introduced Thursday as the new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. From the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, the first American pontiff then reminded the audience that those were also the first words Jesus spoke after His resurrection.
“This is the peace of the risen Christ,” the man born Robert Francis Prevost continued, “an unarmed and disarming peace, humble and persevering.”
My eyes and heart welled with pride as I listened to his short speech — as a Catholic, yes, but especially as an American.
The faithful in Los Angeles, America’s most Catholic city, were delighted — and a little stunned — to learn a Chicago-born priest with deep roots in Peru had been elected to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
Next month will mark a decade since Donald Trump descended down a golden escalator at his namesake Manhattan tower to announce his 2016 presidential campaign and offer his own version of spiritual renewal. His MAGA gospel wasn’t based on the words of Jesus, but rather American exceptionalism at its worst: isolationism, jingoism, grievance, xenophobia and the idea that you should take care of yourself and screw everyone else.
Instead of finding salvation, Americans are more paranoid and divided than ever. We seek deliverance from our national malaise from anywhere and everywhere, to little avail. But in Pope Leo, we now have an American leader who can remind us and the world what the United States represents at its best.
His ancestry is multicultural — French, Italian, Black, Hispanic — and his maternal grandparents moved from New Orleans to Chicago. He went to school and church in Chicago’s blue-collar South Side, then attended Villanova University. The young Robert Prevost became a missionary in Peru for the Augustinians before going to Rome to head the religious order, which focuses on helping the marginalized of society.
He applied that life experience to his last role before becoming pope: helping the late Pope Francis find candidates for bishop around the globe, beyond the Church’s traditional recruiting areas of Europe and the Americas. Yet he never shied away from his roots, frequently returning to Chicago to meet with friends, eat at favorite spots and root for the White Sox (talk about a man who sympathizes with the wretched of the earth!).
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Above all, the arc of Pope Leo’s career is a testament to how true strength and success come through service for others — something that Americans have long felt was important to a healthy democracy but that hasn’t been emphasized lately by the powers that be. The new pope told the faithful as much in his inaugural speech, urging that they be “a Church that walks, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close especially to those who suffer.”
Such language is heresy for too many Trump supporters, some of whom are already trashing Pope Leo as anti-American. They’ve strayed far from what the United States is at its best, the country that I love. (Trump, for his part, congratulated Pope Leo on social media, describing his election as “a Great Honor for our Country.”)
In my America, like Pope Leo’s, speaking multiple tongues and being a citizen of multiple countries is normal, not treasonous — Leo is a dual Peruvian U.S. citizen who speaks five languages. My America is one not of fear but of embrace, a worldview Pope Leo echoed when he called on us to accept others with “open arms,” especially “all those who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”
Contrary to what Trump insists, we remain the greatest country on Earth. This is why our nation has drawn so many immigrants since its founding and continues to do so. People come here to be part of our grand experiment, predicated on the ideal of equality and prosperity, that anything is possible if you put in the work for yourself and others.
The selection of Pope Leo by the College of Cardinals to a position once thought impossible for a son of Uncle Sam to occupy is not just a rebuke to Trump’s vision for an imperial United States. It’s a challenge to Americans to lean on the side of us that’s known for being charitable, not whatever Trump is trying to turn us into.
We Americans should also take note of Leo XIV’s choice for his papal name. He has yet to offer a reason, but many Vatican observers have speculated that he’s honoring the last pontiff who went by it.
Pope Leo XIII was a fierce advocate for workers and the downtrodden during the latter part of the 19th century, an era also fraught with technological and political upheaval. In an 1899 encyclical, he warned American Catholics not to stray from the Church’s teachings in the name of following “the spirit of the age,” arguing there was more to the good life than the pursuit of money and individualism.
When I read that now, I think of the well-funded push by conservative American Catholics to undercut Pope Francis and sow internal doubt and dissent, all because he always reminded us to live by Jesus’ admonition to help “the least of these.” Pope Leo praised his predecessor for his “courageous voice,” leaving little mystery about where he stood on the Francis question.
The new pontifex maximus has much work ahead of him to wrangle the faithful into unity.
We are a perpetually unsatisfied people, so I’m not sure how many of us — Catholic or not — will heed Pope Leo’s invitation to embrace peace and reflect on what we can do to better us all. But he seemed to have Americans on his mind in his first homily as pope.
The Gospel’s message of charity and faith is sometimes dismissed as “meant for the weak and unintelligent” in a world where “other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure,” Leo told the cardinals before him.
Invoking imagery used by American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, he said that God has called on him to lead the Church “in order that she may be ever more fully a city set on a hill, an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world.”
Those words have long reminded Americans of our obligation to be great. May the example of Pope Leo, not the bloviations of Trump, spark that in us again.
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