Praying that Leo XIV is the Pope we need now

National Post, 11 May 2025

A 'citizen of the world,' the new pontiff brings renewed hope for global peace

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago, is now Pope Leo XIV. He is the first American, by way of Italy and Peru, to be elevated to the See of Peter.

His election coincided with the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945. Pope Leo XIV’s first words on the balcony of St. Peter’s were the first words of the Risen Christ: “Peace be with you!”

The world ardently desired peace in 1945. Peace remains desired now — enduring peace, true harmony, not just the absence of war. That peace which is most deeply desired in hearts, in families, in cultures and between nations, is not the work purely of human hands, but remains the gift of Jesus risen from the dead.

Pope Leo began what has been the primary task of the Apostle Peter and his successors since the day of Pentecost, to bear witness to the Risen Christ who, as the Holy Father put it in his first address, “is the bridge by which the love of God reaches us.”

After Leo’s election, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York — the contemporary caput mundi, as Rome was in Peter’s day — said of the new Holy Father that he is a “citizen of the world.”

Having grown up in Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Leo studied in Rome, spent two decades as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, and 12 years in Rome as the superior general of his religious community, the Order of St. Augustine.

“Citizen of the world” is an appellation in bad odour today, as “globalists” are denigrated as architects of all manner of evils and ills. Those who faced the reconstruction of Europe in 1945 — and the building of an enduring peace — did not fear the broader view. They had painfully fresh memories of the horrors of nationalism and the failure of international bridge-building.

Dolan of New York added that the Christian’s true citizenship is in “the world to come” or, as Pope Leo put it, “to walk together toward that homeland that God has prepared.”

Here and now though, the Christian is called to be a citizen of the world, not in opposition to his own country, but as a complement to it. The salvation promised first to Israel has become a light for all nations.

The word “catholic” means “universal,” which why the Catholic Church speaks of her pope as the “universal pastor” and herself as a sign of the universal bonds of humanity. Every Catholic is supposed to be a citizen of the world; Pope Leo’s tricontinental life just makes that more plain.

In Peru he was in a different country, but not amongst strangers. He learned a new language, but did not preach a different faith. He adopted the nationality of that country, but he already shared with his flock a common baptism.

In 2025, the world is turning away from the institutions of peace built after 1945. Those are strategic and commercial decisions, but they reflect a moral change, a desire to draw back from the other, a retreat from great catholic enterprises, in the universal sense.

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