A week after he was elected 267th pontiff, Pope Leo XIV gathered the world’s ambassadors to the Holy See in the Vatican’s richly marbled Clementine Hall. The aim of the Catholic Church’s international outreach, he said, was “peace”.
Peace requires “carefully choosing our words”, he told the diplomats. “For words too, not only weapons, can wound and even kill.”
Cautious communications have defined the first three months of Pope Leo’s papacy and represent the clearest shift from his predecessor Pope Francis, whose casual style and off-the-cuff remarks endeared him to many but could also cause division and controversy.
“Pope Leo is more of a mediator,” says Saverio Gaeta, a Vaticanologist and author of biographies of both popes. “Francis was less diplomatic. He didn’t always moderate his words.”
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By making few headlines in his first three months, Leo has defied the old received wisdom that it would be impossible to have a pope from the United States because he would be a media magnet, his words constantly interpreted as commentary on political events in Washington.
“The pope who emerged from the conclave was not the most ‘papabile’ [likely candidate], but is the pope who brings together the different strands of the church,” says Father Fabio Nardelli, OFM, a lecturer at two pontifical universities in Rome. “He has emphasised unity.”
It was Francis who elevated Robert Francis Prevost, as he was then known, into high church office. In advance of this year’s conclave he was seen as someone from the Argentine’s camp, and since his election Leo’s public addresses have indeed been peppered with fond references to his predecessor.
However, from the first moments of his papacy Leo has also quietly resumed traditions that Francis had shirked, reassuring conservatives. In a critical article, former president Mary McAleese this week took issue with his attitude toward women and same-sex marriage, along other things.
After the white smoke signalled his election on May 8th, Leo appeared on the balcony over St Peter’s Square dressed in a red mozzetta, a traditional elbow-length cape. It was a garment Francis had dispensed with, preferring to wear simply a white cassock, part of his dislike for pomp.
In this time of epochal change, the Holy See cannot fail to make its voice heard in the face of the many imbalances and injustices that lead, not least, to unworthy working conditions and increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden societies
— Pope Leo
Leo also resumed the tradition of escaping the Roman heat to spend a holiday at Castel Gandolfo, the lakeside town that has hosted popes for centuries and where townsfolk delightedly greeted the return of a pontiff after a 12-year hiatus.
Where Francis famously chose to live in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse in Vatican City, Leo is expected to take up residence in the traditional papal rooms of the Apostolic Palace, which is being renovated in anticipation of his arrival. There, he will have a private diningroom, chapel, library, study, and bedroom beside the famous window where popes deliver the Sunday Angelus.
Leo’s appointments – and to a certain extent access to him – will be managed by a personal secretary within the papal quarters, another tradition that Francis had dispensed with. It’s a return to the more formal Vatican structure of the past.
“Living in Santa Marta, Francis would bump into people in the lift, on the stairs, in the courtyard, and he exchanged words with some of them. Some gave him their opinions and suggestions,” Gaeta recalls, describing the confusion that would ensue among fellow Vaticanologists as they sought to clarify remarks Francis had been purported to say.
“The fact that there wasn’t a filter allowed him to say things that sometimes went too far, and caused problems,” he adds. “Leo is returning to what was normality before.”
One camp Leo has gently reached out to is the Curia, the Vatican’s internal bureaucracy. Whereas Francis openly chastised the officials, accusing them of gossiping, rivalry, and seeking worldly profit, Leo used his first meeting with them to thank them for their work as custodians of the “historical memory” of the church.
“Popes pass; the Curia remains,” Leo flattered them.
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His first words as Pope spoke of building bridges; in a seven-minute address, he used the word “peace” seven times. The choice of “Leo” as his name sent a message from the offset that Prevost intended to act as a steadying hand.
The last Pope Leo reigned at the turn of the 20th century and is remembered for advocating a middle way at a time of revolutionary change, opposing both unfettered capitalism and radical socialism while advocating for workers’ rights.
“His was a time of schisms. His leadership guided the boat of St Peter on to calmer seas,” Nardelli says.
The new Pope has said he was thinking particularly of Rerum Novarum, a work by the prior Leo that is considered the foundation of modern Catholic social doctrine. He told cardinals in May that the church needed to respond to a new technology-led industrial revolution that had occurred, referring in particular to artificial intelligence.
“In this time of epochal change, the Holy See cannot fail to make its voice heard in the face of the many imbalances and injustices that lead, not least, to unworthy working conditions and increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden societies,” Leo said.
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“Every effort should be made to overcome the global inequalities – between opulence and destitution – that are carving deep divides between continents, countries and even within individual societies.”
Artificial intelligence has emerged as an early theme of his papacy and it is expected to feature in his first papal encyclical, a document setting out guidance on Catholic teaching. Leo is believed to be using his time at Castel Gandolfo, where he has few public appointments, to work on the text.
Traditionally, a pope’s first encyclical lays out a roadmap for the papacy ahead, and Leo’s is expected to address the centrality of Christ, the church’s missionary role – and how the global church, in all its diversity, can remain unified.
As a US cardinal, Prevost was keenly aware that Francis’s papacy had in some quarters been controversial. In the US, some conservative factions had taken to openly criticising and challenging Francis’s teachings.
In an address to an Illinois parish in 2024, Prevost defended the pontiff as someone chosen by the Holy Spirit who was truly trying to live out the words of the gospel.
“Francis is not afraid to rock the boat a bit, to shake things up, and when he does that there are people who are uncomfortable,” he told the churchgoers. “I do think that some things he says and does are not understood by everyone.”
In the same talk, Prevost displayed a wariness of speaking freely in public himself, telling the audience that his work of appointing bishops could involve “politics”.
“If I get into this, I don’t know if I’m being livestreamed but it can be dangerous ...” he trailed off. Asked for his best stories about Pope Francis, whom he knew for decades, he replied humorously: “The best stories I can’t tell here, but if you catch me in the parking lot, maybe one or two.”
For all his caution in public appearances, there are indications that Leo is not the aloof figure that some popes were in the past.
In June, he took on his personal secretary in a game of tennis in the grounds of his old Augustinian order, according to its current prior general Father Alejandro Moral, an old friend. Moral also disclosed that the Pope remains an avid user of WhatsApp, responding to messages at three in the morning.
Father Ángel Peña, pastor of the Parish of St Martin of Tours, in Leo’s old diocese of Chiclayo, told a Vatican News documentary that he used to get birthday messages each year on May 10th from the man he knew as “Padre Roberto”. When Leo became pope on May 8th, he assumed he would no longer have time.
“Suddenly at five in the afternoon here in Peru a message arrived from Cardinal Prevost, now Pope: ‘Happy birthday Ángel. God bless you,’” the priest said. “I kept looking at the message to see if it was real.”
Leo used English to put international journalists at ease at an early gathering after his election, with a self-deprecating quip wondering whether they would still be awake at the end of his speech.
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Yet although he is arguably the first pope to be a native speaker of English – at least since the election of Adrian in 1154, who would have spoken Middle English – Leo’s use of the global lingua franca has been somewhat sparse.
Italian is the language he has used for most messages of substance since he became Bishop of Rome, along with some use of the Spanish of his adopted Peru.
English appears to be Pope Leo’s diplomatic language, used in meetings with international visitors like US vice-president JD Vance and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but not often in public addresses.
Some Vatican watchers have wondered whether limiting his use of English in this way is a deliberate choice that has helped him keep a low profile, given the greater scrutiny such declarations could bring.
“I think Leo will contribute to peace around the world, but will also bring some pacification within the church, in areas where there have been difficulties,” says Gaeta, the Vaticanologist.
“They are already beginning to be reconciled.”
