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A friend of New Boston Post recently suggested that “Leo might be a sane version of Francis.”
That would be a marked improvement over the recent reign of Pope Francis – who set a strange course for the Barque of Peter during his 12-year papacy, which ended in his death April 21.
Francis wasn’t all bad. His outreach to people on the margins seemed sincere and set a good example, as did his emphasis on God’s mercy.
But truth demands candid analysis of the public actions of public figures.
Pope Francis’s caprice, pettiness, vindictiveness, and poor analysis hindered his papacy.
The new pontiff elected Thursday, May 8 is Pope Leo XIV. America's first pope, the former Cardinal Robert Prevost grew up just south of Chicago. He is a Chicago White Sox fan and a Villanova University alumnus.
He is said to have been on friendly terms with Pope Francis. But it also seems that he had friendly dealings with people of various points of view during his time as a missionary priest in Peru, as head of the Order of Saint Augustine, as a diocesan bishop in Peru, and as head of the Vatican department that deals with bishops worldwide.
It’s not necessary for Leo to publicly spurn Francis in order to do a better job as pope.
Here are seven ways he can do just that.
In January 2018, Pope Francis accused victims of clergy sexual abuse in Chile of committing “calumny” against a bishop he had appointed there because they correctly pointed out that he had enabled a priest sex abuser.
Francis was slow to act against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick upon being given evidence that the former archbishop of Washington had in earlier years pressured seminarians to share a bed with him.
Francis eventually did the right thing in both cases – he forced out the bishop of Chile in June 2018.
Also around that time, after evidence emerged that McCarrick had years earlier sexually abused boys as a priest in the Archdiocese of New York, Francis forced him to resign from the College of Cardinals, and in February 2019 he dismissed McCarrick as a priest and bishop.
But the 459-page McCarrick Report – issued by the Vatican in November 2020 and largely meant to defend Pope Francis – shows that dealing with a prominent wayward prelate wasn’t high enough on Francis’s list of priorities.
It must be high on Pope Leo’s.
Pope Francis declared in May 2024 that industrial activity that he claimed hastened climate change is a “structural sin” – whatever that means.
Francis harped on climate change for much of his papacy, always assuming that climate change propaganda is true, without providing evidence.
This suboptimal analysis of science followed his suboptimal analysis of economics – which amounted to the idea that poor countries are poor because rich countries make money by exploiting them.
Neither of these things is correct.
But Francis practically elevated these wrong ideas to articles of faith.
Concern for the environment is a worthy goal for all of us, including the Catholic Church.
Concern for the poor is a fundamental teaching of the Catholic Church, as it was for Jesus of Nazareth.
Pope Leo XIV can pursue both the health of the environment and the needs of poor people without falling victim to socialist talking points.
Pope Francis had a strange preference for appointing bishops and cardinals with doubtful allegiance to the Catholic Church.
One example: Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the archbishop of Luxembourg, whom Francis appointed cardinal in 2019, in February 2022 rejected the Church’s teaching that same-sex sex acts are wrong and has left the door open for the ordination of women as priests.
That’s heresy.
In April 2023, knowing that the man disbelieves at least some of what the Catholic Church teaches, Francis appointed him to his nine-member Council of Cardinals.
In other words, it wasn’t enough to elevate him to the 120-plus-member body that elects the next pope. He put him in the inner circle of that already-august body.
It’s one example of a recurring theme under Pope Francis: Though possibly not personally heretical himself, Francis seemed to prefer the company of non-believers to the company of faithful Catholics.
In the United States, under Francis it has been all but impossible for priests who have a reputation for effectively explaining and defending Church doctrine to get appointment as a bishop.
Now, to be fair, Pope Francis was right in discerning that doctrine isn’t everything. “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal,” St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:1.
But why prefer clerics who preach what the Church teaches over clerics who don’t?
Pope Leo can do better on this score simply by not spurning clerics who stand up for the faith.
Pope Francis included a famous footnote in his 2015 encyclical Amoris Laetitia that suggested divorced-and-civilly-remarried Catholics might “In certain cases” be able to receive communion without first getting the Church to declare their first marriage null by reason of some impediment.
The document doesn’t say what those “certain cases” might be.
Four cardinals privately asked the pope to explain what he meant.
He ignored them.
Then they publicly asked him publicly to explain what he meant.
He continued to ignore them.
Pope Francis had an obligation to answer the question, and he failed – apparently out of pique.
This dereliction of duty undermined the pope’s role as teacher of the faith.
It was behavior unbecoming a pope.
Pope Leo XIV can improve on Francis’s performance simply by answering questions about his own teachings, including tough ones.
Father Marko Rupnik, 70, a priest and artist from Slovenia, has been accused by 20 women of abusing them sexually and spiritually.
For that he got excommunicated from the Church and kicked out of the Jesuits.
But Pope Francis quietly lifted the excommunication after a short while, and Rupnik was subsequently able to attach himself (the Church term is “incardinated) as a priest in good standing to a diocese in Slovenia.
Francis, who has been reported to be a pal of Rupnik’s, never explained his actions, or the apparent slow-walking of the Church investigation into this priest’s troubling priest.
Pope Leo ought to ensure that Rupnik is investigated quickly, and the new pope needs to take appropriate action afterward, whatever that may be.
A minority of Catholics worldwide prefer the pre-1970 Tridentine Rite of the Mass celebrated in Latin. They ought to be able to go to it.
But Pope Francis strangely thought otherwise.
In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI allowed priests all over the world to celebrate the Tridentine Rite of the Mass in Latin without getting permission from a diocesan bishop, which brought Latin Mass Catholics in from the wilderness.
Pope Francis correctly diagnosed a problem – that some Latin Mass-goers deny the validity of the current ordinary form of the Mass implemented in 1970 (known as the Novus Ordo, or “new order”).
His reaction was to try to hit a two-inch-nail problem with a sledgehammer.
Priests now need special permission from their bishop to say the Latin Mass. Parish churches aren’t supposed to offer it. Priests ordained after July 2021 must obtain special permission from the Vatican to say it.
In a word: Persecution.
All Pope Leo XIV has to do to solve the problem Pope Francis created is to allow the Latin Mass to be widely celebrated again.
Most church-going Catholics will not pay much attention to it. They prefer the post-1970 Novus Ordo form of the Mass and will continue attending it.
But Latin Mass Catholics will feel restored to their rightful place in the Church.
Pope Francis visited four countries that border his native Argentina during his 12 years as pope -- but not Argentina.
He never explained this odd decision, which was obviously intentional – although he did suggest at times that he would visit Argentina, which makes it worse.
The people of a country that happen to produce a pope deserve a moment in the sun when they get to greet him in person. The previous two non-Italian popes in modern times – John Paul II and Benedict XVI – went home to Poland and Germany, respectively, to enthusiastic crowds. Argentinians should have had that opportunity, or at least an explanation for why they couldn’t.
Pope Leo XIV ought to come to the United States soon.
Perhaps he can throw out the first pitch at a White Sox game or sit courtside at a Villanova basketball game.