VATICAN CITY – Since the bells tolled in May for Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pontiff largely guarded his words, appealing to all sides of a divided church. But in recent comments, as well as in his first major papal document issued Thursday, Leo has begun to reveal himself – leaving some conservative critics of his predecessor tut-tutting about the possible rise of another “liberal pope.”
Leo’s new document, an apostolic exhortation defending the poor and marginalized, is based on an unfinished text started by Pope Francis. In it, he quotes Francis, calling on the faithful to “welcome, protect, promote and integrate” migrants. Leo takes aim at Christians who embrace “secular ideologies or political and economic approaches that lead to gross generalizations and mistaken conclusions.” (He suggests they “go back and reread the Gospel.”) And, deploying some of the same charged phrases favored by Francis, he pillories market capitalism, deriding “the dictatorship of an economy that kills” by enriching a small wealthy elite.
“Either we regain our moral and spiritual dignity,” the document states, “or we fall into a cesspool.”
The document’s release follows the most vocal 10 days of Leo’s pontificate. In rare off-the-cuff comments to the press, he chided people who call themselves “pro-life” simply because they oppose abortion. He expressed distaste for the warlike rhetoric at a recent meeting of U.S. generals that was hastily called by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
At an Oct. 1 Vatican summit, Leo condemned deniers of global warming and issued a blunt call to climate action. And on Sunday, in St. Peter’s Square, he declared a new “missionary age” against “the coldness of indifference” to migrants.
On Wednesday, he met privately with Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, a critic of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, along with other U.S. pro-migrant activists, to receive letters and testimonies from those living in “fear” of detention and deportation in the United States.
Leo “was very clear that what is happening to migrants in the United States right now is an injustice,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Texas-based Hope Border Institute, who attended the meeting. “He said the church cannot remain silent.”
The conservative critics speaking out have taken particular umbrage with Leo’s answer last week to a question from a reporter about a move by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich – the archbishop of Leo’s hometown, Chicago – to grant Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) a lifetime achievement award for his work on immigration. Several bishops challenged that decision over Durbin’s support for abortion rights. Last week, Cupich said Durbin had decided not to receive the award.
Leo, in his answer, said that people cannot call themselves “pro-life” if they stand against abortion but endorse “inhuman treatment” of migrants or support the death penalty.
“He weighs into the abortion question through remarks that are absolutely scandalous,” John-Henry Westen, founder of the conservative-Catholic Sign of the Cross Media, said on a podcast last week titled “Pope Fuels Moral Confusion.” Westen added, “He actually says if you call yourself pro-life and you’re in favor of the death penalty you’re not really pro-life.”
Popes tend to transcend political labels. Benedict XVI, who was embraced by traditionalists, also defended the poor and criticized capitalism. Francis may have downplayed the role of the church in the bedroom. But he was also deeply critical of “gender theory,” called for an international ban on surrogacy, and never budged on allowing priests to marry or women to become deacons.
For his part, Leo has already indicated that he will not rush doctrinal change.
Some conservatives, perhaps wishfully, said the exhortation issued Thursday should be viewed more as a last document by Francis than a first by Leo – following a pattern in which Francis at the start of his papacy completed a text begun by Benedict.
“Francis’s first encyclical was a reworked text by Benedict XVI – only for him to later radically change course,” said Luigi Casalini, editor of a traditionalist Latin Mass blog, noting that the current document’s theme of poverty was not among the most hot-button current topics such as gender and artificial intelligence.
“So it rather feels like a debt paid to his predecessor, and to those who voted for him,” Casalini said. “Does Leo reveal himself? My answer is no, not yet – we’ll see in the next encyclical. I don’t want to be optimistic, but I certainly can’t accuse him of being a socialist yet, or a devout follower” of Francis.
Many conservative Catholics in the U.S. and beyond also remain highly optimistic that Leo will heed their calls for greater orthodoxy, and potentially allow more flexibility in saying the old Latin Mass, a touchstone for traditionalists that was sharply curbed under Francis.
On Tuesday, Leo, who has said he has no intention of adding to political divisions, pointedly declined to comment when asked about troop deployments to Chicago. “I prefer not to comment at this time about choices made, political choices within the United States,” Leo said.
Yet if the past days showed anything it’s that even as he tries to avoid politics, politics may find him. Leo holds Peruvian nationality from his years as a missionary there in addition to U.S. citizenship. His critique of market capitalism in particular suggests that in key ways, those who thought they were getting the first American pope are actually getting the second Latin American, one whose stances, like Francis, echo perceptions common in the Global South.
Leo’s increasing focus on the treatment of migrants and criticism of climate change deniers indicates his views inherently conflict with some of the main tenets of the Trump administration.
“The difference between Leo’s vision and Catholics of the right in the United States is clear,” said one senior Vatican official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The tone of a papacy is often a matter of emphasis – and many say it is far too early to judge. Leo’s most vocal emerging critics may also represent a small minority. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in July and August, before his most outspoken statements, found that 84 percent of U.S. Catholics had a favorable view of Leo, with his unfavorable rating at 4 percent.
Alejandro Bermúdez, a self-described “conservative Catholic” and founder of the Catholic News Agency, said Leo has comforted traditionalists by embracing formal vestments and other reverent trappings of his office more than Francis did. Bermúdez said he still sees Leo as a figure of “unity.”
“I have seen colleagues from progressive Catholicism kind of giving victory laps for what the Pope said” in recent days, he said. “I think partisans here are desperate to grab him as a baseball bat to hit the other side, because that’s the church that was left behind by Pope Francis.”
“Conservatives should not be freaking out by these things, because the way the pope is acting is long term,” he added. He said those speaking out tended to be “far more conservative” than most churchgoers.
Many of them, especially in the U.S., also tend to have been vocal critics of Francis.
“Pope Leo has demonstrated that he is much more comfortable in talking about these issues in a way that represents an attempt to find an accommodation with people who promote abortion,” the Rev. Gerald Murray, a Catholic priest and conservative commentator in New York, told the “Prayerful Posse” podcast.
Later referencing Leo’s recent pledge to maintain an open door to LGBTQ+ Catholics, Murray added: “Certainly his statements … [on] how we’re going to deal with the question of homosexuality in the church … [are] not how John Paul II and Benedict did things. This is how Francis did things, and I think we’re seeing more of that.”
Critics of Francis have also chimed in over Leo’s call to action against global warming at a Vatican climate summit last week, deriding his decision to bless a large chunk of ice from a melting glacier in Greenland as theatrics.
“If the Vatican believes it is exempt from the same tragic fate of perdition, when it continues on the same path as other heretics, it will soon discover that God is not to be trifled with,” Carlo Maria Viganò, a former archbishop excommunicated last year for challenging Francis’s authority – including dubbing him “a servant of Satan” – posted on X with a photo of Leo blessing the ice.
Fans of Francis, meanwhile, are celebrating Pope Leo’s emergence.
“Pope Leo has a very different style from Francis, but in terms of the direction and priorities and style of the church, they are cut from the same cloth,” said Austen Ivereigh, a British papal biographer and confidant of Francis. “What we’re seeing in this first October week is the launch of the Leo priorities. Care for creation as God’s gift, welcoming and integrating migrants, and attending to the cry of the poor.”
John Yep, president of the pro-Trump group Catholics for Catholics, said, “The majority of us are, you know, we’re watching, but we’re also not too quick to judge here in the sense of it’s still early on.” However, Yep said that Leo should issue a “correction” to his statement on the meaning of “pro-life” and that “it does seem in short that Pope Leo is continuing the line of Pope Francis by making, you know, immigration rights a preeminent issue of sorts.”
Some traditionalists have criticized Leo for meeting with sharply liberal voices in the church, including the American priest and LGBTQ+ advocate James Martin. But others have praised him for meeting with some of the most vociferous critics of Francis. They include the American Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently authorized to celebrate a high Latin Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica – something prohibited during the last two years of Francis’s papacy.
One American Catholic priest in a conservative parish in North Carolina, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the new pope, said many of his traditionalist parishioners were “concerned” about Leo’s focus on migrants.
“I can say that my parishioners are saying something along the lines of, ‘Why doesn’t he just focus on the church?” the priest said. “I think people here generally think that the Holy Father, or anyone outside the United States, doesn’t understand what immigration looks like in the United States on the day-to-day ground level. They think he doesn’t fully understand the scope of it. Even he has walls in Vatican City.”
On Thursday, Leo published his text “Dilexi Te” (“I Have Loved You”) as an exhortation, or a directive for Catholics that is the third highest form of papal document after an apostolic constitution and papal encyclical. Some of it had been written before Francis’s death in April.
The document stakes out similar ground as Francis, striking chords familiar in the church in Latin America as it sought to put the poor at the center of the faith. It displays strong skepticism of “free-market economics,” chiding the “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation” and that, it says, undermine the role of the state.
It decries “unjust social ideas, and political-economic systems that favor the strongest,” while portraying a “wealthy elite, living in a bubble of … luxury,” as migrants die crossing the Mediterranean. Assertions that global poverty has been reduced, it states, are based on “pseudo-scientific data” seeking to prop up market theories.
At times the two popes’ viewpoints seem to blend, as Leo makes Francis’s unfinished text “his own,” including several references to the thinking of the church in South America, to which – “having served as a missionary in Peru for many years” – Leo declares himself “greatly indebted.”
Leo also returns to a recurrent theme of his early papacy, the primacy of “human dignity,” defending oppressed women who he says should have “identical rights” to men. He champions migrants, calling them “a living presence of the Lord who, on the day of judgment, will say to those on his right: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’”