More than two months have passed since the election of Pope Leo XIV, but the promise and excitement that many felt at his accession to the chair of St. Peter—especially from the people of the United States and Peru, his homeland and adopted home—have hardly dissipated. Like Francis before him, Pope Leo has captured hearts in the honeymoon period of his papacy. As the church and the world adjust to this new pontificate, what can we expect in the future?
The historically minded can be sure that a pope who took the name of Leo will have a strong and welcome focus on Catholic social teaching. From “Rerum Novarum” to Pope Francis’ “Fratelli Tutti,” the social doctrine of the church has been a primary concern of numerous popes since the last Pope Leo wrote the first “social encyclical” in 1891, but the challenge of how to break out of the echo chamber remains a real one. The desire of Leo XIV to link his own papacy to the development of Catholic social teaching was made clear the day he was elected, when papal spokesperson Matteo Bruni said his choice of name was a “direct recall of the social doctrine of the church and of the pope that initiated the modern social doctrine of the church.”
What will that look like in terms of papal teaching and practice? In a world plagued by violations of human dignity and a growing sense that technology and globalization will destroy worker autonomy, an encyclical on the rights of labor is a likely first step. The role that the development of artificial intelligence is playing in eroding workplace security is also a concern of the new pope. Many American politicians and corporations may not like what Leo will have to say on the subject—“mater sí, magistra no” remaining an unspoken conviction for many at the top of the global economy—but perhaps nowhere else is the church’s teaching authority and credibility more needed than on questions of human dignity and a just economy.
At the same time, Pope Leo has made it clear that the promotion of Catholic social teaching requires dialogue and attention to economic realities, noting that the church’s social teaching “seeks to encourage genuine engagement with social issues. It does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth, either in its analysis of problems or its proposal of concrete solutions.”
That conviction that the church has a role to play in creating just structures will feed into what is likely to be a second major focus for Leo: synodality. Whether he pursues it in the same style as Francis or not, Leo made it clear that synodality would continue. Early administrative moves by Leo, including the appointment of Tiziana Merletti, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor, as the first high-level appointment of his papacy, suggest that he will follow Francis’ lead in continuing to recalibrate curial governance. At the same time, he may take a more friendly and less chiding tone than Francis in his relationship to the Curia, which he described as “the institution that preserves and transmits the historical memory of a church.”
Leo has also made it clear that “synodality and ecumenism are closely linked” in his discussions of the celebration of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Any continuing rapprochement with the Eastern Orthodox churches will require some rethinking on the part of Rome regarding structures of governance, so another welcome consequence of a continued focus on synodality might be greater steps toward Christian unity.
Leo’s comments on Catholic social teaching, synodality and ecumenism all share another common thread, one perhaps unexpected when coming from a pope but welcome nonetheless: an emphasis on our shared search for the truth. Some of Francis’ detractors made it clear that they found his pontificate a source of “confusion,” and that they hoped for greater emphasis on doctrinal precision from his successor. The first days of Leo XIV’s papacy have not lacked for clarity, but rather than correcting Francis, Leo has endorsed his teaching, describing him as “masterfully and concretely set[ting] forth” the path for the universal church following the Second Vatican Council in his first apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium.”
In his remarks on May 13 to the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, founded by Pope John Paul II in 1993 to disseminate the church’s social teachings, Leo remarked on the relationship between dialogue and doctrine. While for many the two seem incompatible, doctrine does not have to mean only “a set of ideas belonging to a religion.” It can also, he said, “be seen as the product of research, and hence of hypotheses, discussions, progress and setbacks, all aimed at conveying a reliable, organized and systematic body of knowledge about a given issue.” The church’s social doctrine, in other words, can be understood as “a common, collective and even multidisciplinary pursuit of truth.”
Because of that commitment to a common and collective pursuit of the truth, Pope Leo called “indoctrination” an immoral act, one that “stifles critical judgment and undermines the sacred freedom of respect for conscience, even if erroneous. It resists new notions and rejects movement, change or the evolution of ideas in the face of new problems.” With regard to the church’s social teaching, he said, doctrine “aims to teach us primarily how to approach problems and, even more importantly, how to approach people. It also helps us to make prudential judgments when confronted with challenges.”
To be clear: The pope was speaking in this context of the church’s social teaching, not suggesting a universally applicable model for interpretation and development of doctrine. However, the connection he makes between dialogue and doctrine as aspects of a shared search for the truth could have broad implications for how he teaches and how the church receives his teaching. For those whose instinct is to treat challenging questions about church teaching as tantamount to formal dissent, it may ask them to develop greater openness to processes of dialogue. For those whose instinct is that contemporary questions point to a need for change in church teaching, it may ask them to deepen their appreciation for doctrine as a collective, systematic and reliable body of knowledge.
Of course, the church and the world learned over the last 12 years that whatever we might expect of a new pontiff, the only guarantee is that we will be surprised. So, too, this time around, we should be prepared for most if not all of our expectations and predictions for Pope Leo to be insufficient to the man and the office.
In his homily for Pentecost on June 8, Pope Leo suggested his own yardstick for measuring the work of the church: our openness. “We are truly the church of the Risen Lord and disciples of Pentecost if there are no borders or divisions among us,” he preached, “if we are able to dialogue and accept one another in the church, and to reconcile our diversities; and if, as church, we become a welcoming and hospitable place for all.”
