Opinion: A New Pope in a Secular World

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The installation of a new pope could be an opportunity for greater awareness of one of the world’s great religious denominations. Unfortunately, too often, for many, it becomes no more than an opportunity for people to take gratuitous swipes at Catholicism, at Christianity, even at religion in general, which is unhelpful, to say the least.

Gentle Reader, I am not a theologian and I don’t pretend to be; I’m a primarily political writer so I see this through the lens of society as a whole. The Roman Catholic Church is the biggest single religious denomination on earth; it is the moral guidepost for its members and for many others. We are all better off if we at least understand it correctly.

So let’s take the opportunity to look at a few distinct issues and questions that are relevant at the moment.

The Catholic Church

Some non-Catholics ask why it should interest them at all; why does the press report more on Catholic news than on the news of other denominations. Why should a non-Catholic care about a new pope?

The short answer is, because the Roman Catholic Church plays a large role in our community. It operates grammar schools and high schools, colleges and universities. Catholic orders have long operated both full-fledged hospitals and remote medical clinics for the poor and underserved. Catholic orders operate orphanages and soup kitchens. And Catholic churches are often the centers of their communities, often with dozens of groups within them, from kids’ basketball teams to adult bridge clubs to senior citizens’ garden clubs.

You may respond, “But so do other churches!” Yes indeed. Lutheran churches, Presbyterian churches, Hassidic synagogues and Greek Orthodox churches all do the same things, running schools and civic groups, operating hospitals and charities. And they deserve recognition for that contribution as well.

The Roman Catholic Church is just the largest of them all, with about 1.4 billion members worldwide. That makes its activities, and especially its election of a “chairman of the board,” legitimately newsworthy.

The Pope

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard or read the words “I don’t need a pope to talk to God” or “the pope is just another mortal man, he’s nothing special” over the past couple weeks since the late Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina died at 88; I could take my family to a nice dinner.

It may come as a shock to such commenters, but – Catholics don’t disagree.

We refer to our popes by some pretty lofty titles, like “His Holiness” and “the Vicar of Christ,” but frankly, these are just titles out of respect for the office.

We don’t claim, or believe, that a pope is any kind of superhuman angel. When a pope dies, all the cardinals under age 80 get together in a room in Rome to elect his successor, and they select the person they believe to be best able to lead the church. While they don’t have to select one of their own – they can legally select any Catholic male for the job – they always do select a fellow cardinal, because these are the people they know best, the people they have the best hope of trusting to understand the job.

All the cardinals were regular mortal men five minutes before the election; the winner isn’t going to be transformed into something else five minutes later. No Catholic is under any illusion that the pope is anything but a fellow human being.

Some popes have been declared saints after their deaths, but not all of them, not even most of them. While a pope should be a pastor at heart, he must also be the leader of a massive bureaucracy – that’s the job – as well as technically being a head of state in his own right. The Vatican is a tiny country, as countries go, but it is still a country, making its leader a member of the world’s family of monarchs, presidents, dictators and prime ministers.

Sometimes the pope leans more toward one of those directions than another, and sometimes we see such differences starkly during the transition from the last pope to the next. We have had popes who were recognizable as pastors, as scholars, as teachers, as accountants, as politicians, as philosophers. How does one man wear all those different hats at once, and fulfill all those jobs well?

The Triregnum (The Triple Crown)

For the past 800 years or so, every pope was crowned with a three-level papal tiara, formally known as the Triregnum. Some were simple and some were adorned and bejeweled, designed in a variety of styles, all with three distinct levels to signify the different roles of the pope on earth. Even though recent popes have not worn the Triregnum at their installation (the last to use it was Pope Paul VI, in the 1960s), the concept of the triple crown helps us to understand the unusual role of the pope.

· A pope is a pastor, a religious leader and teacher of his flock, hopefully a facilitator to help Catholics connect better with the Lord above.

· A pope is also an administrator, both the chief of staff of the religious hierarchy of the Catholic church’s diocesan priests, bishops and cardinals, and also the chief to whom all the religious orders report. So that means your parish priest reports in a “diocesan” chain of command up to the pope, and the brothers and sisters at Benedictine, Dominican or Trappist monasteries and convents report in a separate, “religious order” chain of command up to the pope. The pope manages these administrations, and also manages the theological doctrine of the Church.

· Finally, on top of all this, he’s a head of state. And while the Vatican is tiny, as countries go, the pope can command an outsized amount of respect from world leaders because of the Church’s billion-plus members.

Parson, manager, world leader. It takes an unusual skill set to be a good pope; perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the really good ones are rare.

Doctrine

The Roman Catholic Church is a very doctrine-focused organization. Perhaps some would say, “that isn’t for everybody.” There are many churches in the world, some of which focus more on music or social interaction, or more on politics or charity, or more on their specific services, than on the sometimes-dry specifics of theological precision. And that works well for some of them.

The Roman Catholic Church, however, isn’t so much a geographical or political or social organization; it’s a body of specific fundamental positions. People join the Roman Catholic Church, and raise their children in it, because they believe these positions are correct; because they precisely subscribe to the Nicene Creed. It’s about certain truths – the Hypostatic Union, the Transubstantiation of the Eucharist, the Sacrifice on Good Friday, the Resurrection, the Ascension. Roman Catholicism is precise about what each of these means, and so much more.

You may not agree with them, and that’s fine; you can join a church that agrees with you.

But the Roman Catholic Church must be clear on these positions, and we have occasionally seen popes who allowed other interests – from politics to administration to simply trying to be a good role model – to distract them from the importance of doctrine, and when that happens, the cardinals try to make sure to choose a pope who will correct the path on such matters.

For about 35 years, we enjoyed masterful clarity as Pope John Paul II and then Pope Benedict XVI, true scholars and theologians at heart, ensured that the message was clear. We have missed that clarity over the past dozen years, and we expect Pope Leo XIV to return to emphasizing the delivery of clarity in these matters. For most Catholics, this will be a welcome change.

Politics

We view world leaders as politicians, even if they have other responsibilities too. As Pope Leo XIV settles into his new position, the rest of the world will view him as a head of state, and may pay attention to the possible political meanings to his statements. That’s fair, but we must remember that the context on his mind will not necessarily be the same as the context on our minds… because we think of each issue in terms of our own countries, and he must think of each issue in terms of the entire world. The planet is his parish now.

When we think of illegal aliens invading our country, for example, we refer to the millions of people who pushed aside the millions of applicants who were patiently waiting for the legal path, and we think of the criminals whom foreign drug gangs send in to corrupt our youth and rob our people, and we think of the countless terrorists and other invaders whom Venezuela and Cuba and China are sending us, mixed in with the caravans so they aren’t noticed as they pollute our society.

By contrast, when Pope Leo thinks of migrants, he thinks of his last post in Peru, where he saw innocent families fleeing the evils of Venezuelan marxism, and the honest families fleeing Mexican corruption, and the decent folks escaping the drug cartels of Colombia.

When Pope Leo XIV calls for the world to have compassion for migrants, his thoughts are colored by a different experience. Both of these populations are real; both matter, but his position is not as foreign to ours as it might seem at first.

And the issue of migrants isn’t alone; many issues must be viewed that way, when we think of a speaker with a global flock and global responsibilities.

Context matters.

The papacy is a challenging job, one of the most challenging in the world. Some past pronouncements of this new pope have already come back to haunt him, as he wrote tweets as an unknown priest and bishop, without considering how they would sound a decade later coming from a pope.

We should be fair, and cut him some slack in that regard, as we would anyone who is plucked from obscurity to suddenly become among the most well-known faces on earth.

No matter whether we accept the Catholic church as “the closest to the truth” as its members hope it is, or we believe other denominations are closer, everyone on earth should hope for success in this papacy, as Pope Leo XIV tries to lead his flock to be the best they can be, and as he tries to be a role model for both the secular and the religious here on earth.

He doesn’t have to be “your guy” for you to hope that he’s “a good guy” and that his tenure in Rome is good for his church and for the world.

Here’s hoping for a successful papacy, a return to orthodoxy and clarity, and the correction of many divisions and errors that have long reminded us that the Church is made up of regular people, who are indeed all-too-human.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo