Young Latinos are leaving the church. That’s not a problem to be put off. 

According to Pew Research, young Latinos are more likely to be unaffiliated with a religion than they are to be Catholic. Among U.S.-born Latinos ages 18 to 29, 49 percent do not affiliate with a religion. Across all generations, only 36 percent of U.S.-born Latinos identify as Catholic. 

Juan Miguel Alvarez, the director of New Horizons at the University of Notre Dame, noted the trend of disaffiliation in his recent feature for America and recommended some practical solutions. The X-factor, I would argue, is the American who walked out onto the Loggia of Blessings dressed in white just over a year ago. 

When Pope Leo XIV introduced himself to the world in prepared remarks on May 8, 2025, he spoke almost exclusively in Italian. He did pray in Latin and, to the delight of Latin Americans everywhere, he also briefly spoke in Spanish when greeting his “dear Diocese of Chiclayo, Peru.” 

He did not speak English, notably, but it is precisely his ability to speak the language, along with his identification with Latin America, that could help the U.S.-born pope stem the exodus of U.S. Latinos from the church. His linguistic abilities and cultural and technological awareness are the pathway to reach young U.S. Latinos, who navigate a complex, bilingual and bicultural reality that grows more digitized each year. 

Admittedly, the wave of disaffiliation includes immigrants from Latin America who prefer to speak Spanish. Even after acclimating in the United States, many immigrants report feeling more comfortable in their native tongue, especially at Mass or in private prayer. Leo’s comfort speaking Spanish helps with immigrants as it does with his outreach to all of Latin America. 

Yet more than 60 percent of Catholics under 18 are Latino. More than 90 percent of these young Latinos were born in the United States. They often feel more comfortable communicating in English and increasingly feel uncomfortable at church. 

Speaking in English will help Leo connect directly with young people of all ethnic backgrounds in the United States. They will hear and understand his words, spoken with an American accent. 

In his book Blind Spot: The Evangelizing Power of Latino Culture, Deacon Charlie Echeverry writes that bilingual Latinos communicate “in stereo.” “Latinos who straddle equally well both Latino and Anglo communities act as bicultural superconductors,” he writes. 

Biculturality places both Leo and young Latinos in a space best described as “in between.” I am no longer a young Latino, but I know something of this tension, having been born in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican mother and an American father. When we moved to the United States, I was a child and unable to name the discomfort. It has been only as an adult, after reading American Latina and Latino theologians, that I have come to understand this part of myself.

Leo’s own ethnic background also reflects an in-betweenness, starting with a heritage that includes Black Creole, Spanish, French and Italian roots. He has lived the same tension, trading his native Chicago for his adopted home of Chiclayo. 

This in-betweenness can be the place where theologian Alejandro García-Rivera’s “community of the beautiful” emerges. It is not a community of chaos and confusion but rather one of cosmic beauty and reconciliation, where spiritual boldness makes the invisible visible. 

“Together, in their splendid differences, these individuals give witness of God’s power not only to give life but also to ordain it, not only to grant existence but also to order it,” Mr. García-Rivera writes as he concludes The Community of the Beautiful. “As such, these individuals also give witness to the reality of certain relationships, realities held in common, realities that know little of the subject-object split that plagues our understanding today.” 

Pope Leo, an American who chose to become a Peruvian citizen, has chosen this in-betweenness. After all, he is an American in the broader, arguably truer sense of the word—the sense St. John Paul II gave “America” when describing the northern and southern continents in “Ecclesia in America.” Leo can preach the Gospel in such a way that does not make young Latinos choose one culture or another but instead recognizes they belong fully to both. 

This bicultural existence is lived out through technology and evolving methods of communication, and Leo understands that technology can be a pathway for connection. Members of Latino communities have, for example, used social media to alert each other of imminent danger from immigration enforcement in their neighborhoods. And WhatsApp has long connected U.S. Latinos with family members overseas. 

Yet Leo is also quick to acknowledge the pitfalls of technology. The digital periphery is one in which young people may become lonely, misinformed or receive empty algorithmic affirmations. 

“Do not let the algorithm write your story,” Leo said in an address to young people last October. “Be the authors yourselves; use technology wisely, but do not let technology use you…. Instead of being tourists on the web, be prophets in the digital world!”

In the years to come, Leo can leverage language, culture and technology to reach the multifaceted, vibrant young Latino Catholics in the United States. Granted, he is the shepherd of all Catholics. As head of a global church, Leo must seek to share the Gospel with all of the world’s cultures. Yet because of his roots in the United States and Latin America, young Latinos can recognize that this pope is also theirs. 

J.D. Long García is a senior editor at Americaand co-author of Clericalism: The Institutional Dimension of the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis.