We at Catholic Re-Visions asked some scholars to reflect on Pope Leo XIV’s first year as pope. We prompted our three contributors to consider what, beyond the recent news headlines and public fights with political figures, might Leo be contributing to the future of theological reflection in the Catholic church after his first year?
Cristina L.H. Traina
One year into Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, the race is on to characterize his ethics. Just as news outlets eagerly enshrined Pope Francis’s“Who am I to judge?” as the moral emblem of his papacy, so they seem to be declaring Pope Leo XIV’s recent refusal to place sex at the center of Catholic ethical deliberation and moral life “a significant reorientation of the Church’s priorities.”
In both cases they are partly right and partly wrong. Pope Francis’s arresting refusal to condemn LGBTQ Catholics—and his later approval of informal blessings for people in “irregular” relationships—were pastoral gestures, not moral endorsements; he embraced an Ignatian confidence in God’s ability to call us to repentance and renewal from wherever we happen to be, whether in an ill-fated battle against France—as Ignatius was—or in a sacramentally illicit relationship. Likewise, Pope Leo is genuinely concerned that reducing moral reflection to sexual ethics allows us to take a pass on pressing, high-stakes issues like “justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion.” He’s on solid ground; economic and political justice, and more recently peace and ecology, have been at the center of the nearly 140-year-old tradition of Catholic social teaching, in which sexual ethics comes into play only indirectly. In addition, though, as a pope who sees his central task as unifying a diverse global, even ecumenical, communion, he judges that differences over sexual ethics are more likely to drive a wedge into the global church than are his condemnations of tyranny, militarism, and mistreatment of migrants. From the standpoint of church unity, he thinks it’s wise to focus on the latter.
Still, it would be wrong to dismiss Pope Leo as a pragmatist. He resembles his predecessor, who was famous for off-the-cuff remarks, less than he does the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who always deliberated carefully before speaking on moral issues. This suggests that we should take our cues from his 2025 exhortation Dilexi Te. On one hand, it draws heavily on Pope Francis to urge a Christ-like practice of direct, interpersonal charity, without “preliminary studies or advance planning,” that honors each person’s human dignity. On the other, it calls for sophisticated structural analysis of social sin. Insisting that “reality is best viewed from the sidelines,” Leo embraces the epistemological privilege of the poor (with the implication that transformative social movements are of, not for, the poor), enumerates interlocking dimensions of poverty and oppression, acknowledges the impact of intersecting oppressions, and emphasizes access to knowledge as an essential requirement of dignity and social participation. In short, he aims to muster the political will to “resolv[e] the structural causes of poverty.”
In the long run, Pope Leo is likely to lean further into this kind of intersectional structural analysis. Because gender, sexual identity, and sexual orientation are entangled in—and sometimes at the root of—structural poverty,[i] they will not disappear from the conversation. But as long as Catholic bishops deploy official teaching to condone conversion therapy, denial of all gender affirming healthcare, and jailing of LGBTQ people it is perhaps unwise for him to suggest that sex, gender, and sexuality are peripheral to his moral agenda of “justice, equality, [and] freedom.”
[i] With thanks to Sebastian Budinich, Fordham University.
Pope Leo XIV: American Soul
James Padilioni, Jr.
There is a certain irony that the first pope born in the United States has placed popular culture front and center in his witness of the Gospel. Observers from around the world still have favorable views of entertainment media as an American cultural export, despite the harm to the United States’ global reputation on account of its recent political instability. While capitalism too easily distorts and exploits the economic incentives behind the American movie and music recording industries, this should not detract from the fact that human creativity and artistic expression are hallmarks of our divine heritage as souls made in the image of God. It is this creative unction that Pope Leo XIV has found cause to celebrate over the last year.
In September, the Vatican hosted the Grace for the World Concert, which featured the Hip Hop duo Clipse, brothers Gene “(No) Malice” and Terrence “Pusha T” Thornton, accompanied by producer Pharrell Williams and singer-pianist John Legend. To mark the Vatican’s first-ever rap performance, the Thornton brothers delivered an orchestral rendition of their song, “Birds Don’t Sing,” written in honor of their late parents as an ode to grief. The concert, intended as a moment of unity, remembrance, and shared humanity, was co-produced by Pharrell Williams and the Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli, and included musical stylings from Jennifer Hudson, Karol G, and Jelly Roll, who transformed St. Peter’s Square into a stage of peace.
In November, Pope Leo recorded a video greeting for the crowd gathered in front of the cathedral to celebrate the 75th birthday of Archbishop Monsignor Bernard Bober of Košice, Slovakia. In his address, Leo encouraged the attendees to live the Gospel with enthusiasm and to share the joy that springs from following the Lord. But what marked this video message as unique was its backing track of ambient music and angelic choral voices that punctuated the pope’s prayer with an ethereal hush before the bass dropped in with a pounding rhythm and electronic pulsation. Known as the “Dear Young People (Remix),” Pope Leo’s track was produced by the Portuguese priest and DJ Father Guilherme Peixoto who uses electronic dance music to bridge the gap between the Church and the secular world.
Indeed, Pope Leo affirmed this view of music himself during the Vatican’s “Concert with the Poor” held in December. After smiling along to a serenade of Tin Pan Alley standards and Christmas hymns sung by Canadian crooner Michael Bublè, Leo took to the podium where he declared, “This evening, as the melodies touched our hearts, we felt the inestimable value of music: not a luxury for the few, but a divine gift accessible to everyone, rich and poor….Music is like a bridge that leads us to God. It is capable of transmitting feelings, emotions, even the deepest stirrings of the soul, lifting them up and transforming them into an imaginary stairway connecting earth and heaven.”
Pope Leo’s views on music overlaid with his understanding of cinema as well. When the Hollywood celebrities Spike Lee, Cate Blanchett and Judd Apatow joined Pope Leo for a private audience in November, he reiterated his hope that such artforms be “intended for and accessible to all” not just the rich and elite, as movie theaters form a “threshold” where “the heart opens up and the mind becomes receptive to things not yet imagined.” Likening theaters to “the beating hearts of our communities,” Leo told the group that he “find[s] comfort in the thought that cinema is not just moving pictures — it sets hope in motion!”
In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, scholar Martha C. Nussbaum lamented the loss of humanities education in the West which she defined as “critical thought, daring imagination, [and] empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds” (7). This loss of humanities education poses a problem for the social integration of our democracy, as “we seem to be forgetting about the soul…about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans” (6). It is within this void of soulfulness, and in light of our contemporary problems of political domination and warfare, that I find inspiration in Pope Leo’s affirmative view of human creativity and artistic expression. As we mark this first year of his papacy, a time during which many of us have felt as if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Pope Leo reminds us that it is only the imaginal realm of the soul that can preserve our highest hopes and collective aspirations for peace and unity.
James Padilioni, Jr., Pacifica University
Pope Leo, so far
Maureen H. O’Connell
I’m a Christian ethicist who experienced my first theological epiphanies at Pope Leo’s alma mater in Philadelphia. I’m also deeply engaged in the processes of spiritual renewal and structural reform on offer through synodality. This participatory and collaborative approach to Church and discipleship resonates deeply with my work as a community organizer seeking to grow the collective protagonism of Catholics in protecting the common good.
So, I am heartened by the way Pope Leo is living up to two pieces of his identity he shared when he first greeted the world a year ago.
Leo XIV. His papal name signals a renewal of public theology — a commitment to offering the best thinking in our tradition, and the Gospel accounts that source it, to public discourse about life in community. So far, it’s Leo’s words about unity, peace, and reconciliation that land in new ways and new circles of influence, especially when heard in American-accented English. His completion of Dilexi Te lifts up one of the most overlooked principles of Catholic Social Teaching: the preferential option for the poor. Perhaps no modern pope can speak with Leo’s clarity on this Gospel-inspired principle, having practiced it as a young priest in Peru and witnessed the demands it makes of Catholic institutions as Friar General of the Augustinians. Many also anticipate how he’ll lean into his namesake’s legacy on the dignity of work in his own first social encyclical. And given his full participation in the global Synod on Communion, Participation, and Mission, I expect Leo will model how we operationalize this participatory, collaborative way of being Church. Gathering cardinals around round tables at his first Consistory signals a meaningful commitment to walking together as a listening people at every level of the institution.
Son of Augustine. As a feminist theologian, I admit some initial ambivalence here. Augustine’s ideas about women and sexuality informed centuries of problematic Church doctrine about both. And yet, conversations with people deeply committed to the Augustinian charism at Villanova University have renewed my hope. At the heart of that charism is an understanding of what it means to be a pilgrim people navigating human sinfulness in a broken world. We’ve already seen Leo be unapologetic about how the Gospel’s moral compass shapes Christian response to immigration and war. His Augustinian focus on unity and charity invites us to ask: Who are we walking with? Who’s been left behind? Whose lead are we following? Here, his commitment to synodality will allow him to exercise what many name as one of his most impactful leadership skills: active listening.
One of the key promises I see in his papacy is continuity with the synod’s evolving sense of women’s roles in Church life and mission — particularly paragraph #60 of the Final Document. Having been taught by women, learned alongside women headed into mission, tapped women’s ministerial power in Peru, and relied on women’s leadership across Augustinian ministries in 40 countries, Leo brings a different imagination to this question than his saintly and papal forebearers. His recent meeting, for example, with the head of the Anglican communion, may have been more substantive having worked with, leaned on, learned from and even followed women at every level of his own vocational pilgrimage.
