Eleven minutes after Pope Leo XIV appeared on the loggia of St Peter’s Basilica, the culture war was demanding a casualty. Somewhere between the incense and the Latin chant, the new pontiff became, simultaneously, a radical socialist, a crypto-fascist, a heretic, and a Taylor Swift fan. The conclave barely had time to exhale its white smoke before the opinion columns blackened.
Pope Leo XIV, of course, has not yet issued an encyclical. In fact, he has barely spoken in a language discernible to most breakfast television producers. But such niceties are irrelevant in our age of instantaneous judgment, when even papal vestments are subjected to semiotic analysis. “What message is he sending with the mozzetta?” asked one pundit, as though the red cape might signal an intent to seize the means of production.
Critics, left and right, have wasted no time assigning motives to the man whose greatest public achievement so far as pope is successfully appearing solemn while holding his ferula. On the left, suspicion arises from his rumoured fondness for Gregorian chant and an un-ironic belief in sin. On the right, alarm bells ring at his suggestion that billionaires may have a hard time entering heaven. Classic Marx, they fear.
It’s easy to forget, amid the din, that the Pope is not, in fact, a contestant on a reality show. He is not auditioning to be the world’s best influencer. He’s the Bishop of Rome, custodian of a two-thousand-year-old institution that has survived schisms, scandals, and the invention of TikTok. To imagine that he can be immediately understood or dismissed by the standards of a morning panel show is to misunderstand not just him, but the role he inhabits.
And yet, perhaps we should try to understand the culture warriors, at least a little. Ours is a time hungry for symbols. Every public figure is pressed into service as a representative of some cause or grievance. Masculinity, tradition, disruption, progress: the hunger is the same. A new pope, especially one who arrives robed, silent and mysterious, becomes an irresistible screen onto which hopes and anxieties are projected. He doesn’t even need to speak. His presence alone is enough to spark a dozen arguments about what he might mean.
But Pope Leo XIV, if the early signals are to be believed, seems unbothered. He has declined to correct the headlines. He has not blinked at the think pieces. Instead, he has quietly returned to the apostolic palace and, one presumes, prayed. A counter-cultural act, these days.
Perhaps, when the breathless commentary fades and the algorithms move on, we might consider a different frame, one less concerned with optics and more with echoes of something older, stranger, more demanding. Pope Francis, for all the noise that surrounded him, managed to step past the headlines and the agendas, past the exhausting theatre of cultural allegiance, and to see, again and again, the human face, and in that face, the presence of Christ. Maybe what will matter now is not whether Pope Leo XIV reassures or provokes, but whether he can do likewise: bring the Gospel out of abstraction and into something like flesh. Whether he can make grace intelligible not just to those already inclined to listen, but to the restless, the sceptical, the half-interested souls at the edge of the frame. Most of all, whether he can speak the love of Christ in a way that reaches those who are hurt, and those who have stopped expecting to be healed.
Maybe, in time, the test will not be which headlines he inspires or which factions try to enlist him. Perhaps it will be the things that do not trend: the way he attends to the suffering, the tenderness he extends where it costs him, the quiet persistence of someone trying, impossibly, to live and speak in the pattern of the man from Galilee. Not sentimentality, not softness, just the difficult discipline of seeing the whole person before reaching for the certainty of pronouncement.
With any luck, he’ll disappoint everyone equally, and get on with the work of the Gospel.
Consilium 
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