VATICAN CITY – Recently, Pope Leo XIV captivated tens of thousands of young people at a Holy Year celebration by unexpectedly dashing around St. Peter’s Square in the popemobile, harkening back to the informal spontaneity seen during Pope Francis’ 12-year tenure.
However, Leo’s message was distinctly his own: Addressing the crowd in English, Spanish, and Italian, he called the young people the “salt of the Earth, the light of the world,” urging them to carry hope, faith in Christ, and a quest for peace wherever they go.
As Robert Prevost celebrates 100 days as Pope Leo, the shape of his papacy is becoming clearer, particularly in areas continuing Francis’ legacy and those that signal a change. After 12 tumultuous years with Francis, a sense of calm and reserve now pervades the papacy.
Leo seems eager above all to avoid polemics or making the papacy about himself, and wants instead to focus on Christ and peace.
That seems exactly what many Catholic faithful want, and may respond to what today’s church needs.
“He’s been very direct and straightforward … but he’s not engaging in spontaneous press interactions,” said Kevin Hughes, chair of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, Leo’s alma mater. Leo’s different approach from Francis has brought many a sense of relief, Hughes shared during a phone interview.
“Even fervent admirers of Pope Francis were often on edge, unsure of his next move or statement,” added Hughes.
An effort to avoid polemics
In his initial 100 days, Leo has made efforts to mend divisions that grew during Francis’ era, with messages focusing on unity and avoiding controversy. His major concern — the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence — finds agreement across ideological spectrums. This contrasts with Francis’ focus on environmental and migrant issues, which sometimes caused friction with conservatives.
Closer to home, Leo offered the Holy See bureaucracy a reassuring, conciliatory message after Francis’ occasionally authoritarian style rubbed some in the Vatican the wrong way.
“Popes come and go, but the Curia remains,” Leo told Vatican officials soon after his May 8 election.
Continuity with Francis is still undeniable
Leo, though, has cemented Francis’ environmental legacy by celebrating the first-ever ecologically inspired Mass. He has furthered that legacy by giving the go-ahead for the Vatican to turn a 430-hectare (1,000-acre) field north of Rome into a vast solar farm that should generate enough electricity to meet Vatican City’s needs and turn it into the world’s first carbon-neutral state.
He has fine-tuned financial transparency regulations that Francis initiated, tweaked some other decrees to give them consistency and logic, and confirmed Francis in deciding to declare one of the 19th century’s most influential saints, John Henry Newman, a “doctor” of the church.
But he hasn’t granted any sit-down, tell-all interviews or made headline-grabbing, off-the-cuff comments like his predecessor did. He hasn’t made any major appointments, including to fill his old job, or taken any big trips.
In marking the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki last week, he had a chance to match Francis’ novel declaration that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was “immoral.” But he didn’t.
Compared to President Donald Trump, the other American world leader who took office in 2025 with a flurry of Sharpie-penned executive decrees, Leo has eased into his new job slowly, deliberately and quietly, almost trying not to draw attention to himself.
At 69, he seems to know that he has time on his side, and that after Francis’ revolutionary papacy, the church might need a bit of a breather. One Vatican official who knows Leo said he expects his papacy will have the effect of a “calming rain” on the church.
Maria Isabel Ibarcena Cuarite, a Peruvian member of a Catholic charismatic group, said it was precisely Leo’s quiet emphasis on church traditions, its sacraments and love of Christ, that drew her and upward of 1 million young people to Rome for a special Jubilee week this month.
Ibarcena said Francis had confused young people like herself with his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and approval of blessings for same-sex couples. Such gestures went beyond what a pope was supposed to do and what the church taught, she thought.
Leo, she said, has emphasized that marriage is a sacrament between men and woman. “Francis was ambiguous, but he is firm,” she said.
An Augustinian pope
From his very first appearance on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, Leo has insisted he is first and foremost a “son of St. Augustine. ” It was a reference to the fifth century theological and devotional giant of early Christianity, St. Augustine of Hippo, who inspired the 13th century religious Augustinian order as a community of “mendicant” friars.
Like the other big mendicant orders of the early church — the Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites — the Augustinians spread across Christian Europe over the centuries. Today, Augustinian spirituality is rooted in a deep interior life of prayer, living in community, and journeying together in search of truth in God.
In nearly every speech or homily since his May 8 election, Leo has cited Augustine in one way or another.
“I see a kind of Augustinian flavor in the way that he’s presenting all these things,” said Hughes, the theology professor who is an Augustine scholar.
Leo joined the Augustinians after graduating from Augustinian-run Villanova, outside Philadelphia, and was twice elected its prior general. He has visited the Augustinian headquarters outside St. Peter’s a few times since his election, and some wonder if he will invite some brothers to live with him in the Apostolic Palace to recreate the spirit of Augustinian community life there.
A missionary pope in the image of Francis
Leo is also very much a product of the Francis papacy. Francis named Prevost bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, in 2014 and then moved him to head one of the most important Vatican jobs in 2023 — vetting bishop nominations. In retrospect, it seems Francis had his eye on Prevost as a possible successor.
Given Francis’ stump speech before the 2013 conclave that elected him pope, the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio essentially described Prevost in identifying the church’s mission today: He said the church was “called to go outside of itself and go to the peripheries, not just geographic but also the existential peripheries.”
Prevost, who hails from Chicago, spent his adult life as a missionary in Peru, eventually becoming bishop of Chiclayo.
“He is the incarnation of the ‘unity of difference,’ because he comes from the center, but he lives in the peripheries,” said Emilce Cuda, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
Cuda said during a recent conference hosted by Georgetown University that Leo encapsulated in “word and gesture” the type of missionary church Francis promoted.
That said, for all Leo owes to Bergoglio, the two didn’t necessarily get along.
Prevost has recounted that at one point when he was the Augustinian superior, the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires expressed interest in assigning an Augustinian priest to a specific job in his archdiocese.
“And I, as prior general, said ‘I understand, Your Eminence, but he’s got to do something else’ and so I transferred him somewhere else,” Prevost told parishioners in his home state of Illinois in 2024.
Prevost said he “naively” thought the Francis wouldn’t remember him after his 2013 election, and that regardless “he’ll never appoint me bishop” due to the disagreement.
Bergoglio not only made him bishop, he laid the groundwork for Prevost to succeed him as pope, the first North American pope following the first South American.
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