Shut Up About Pope Leo

Since his election on May 8, Pope Leo XIV has become the subject of a torrent of analysis. Time hailed him as a global authority on artificial intelligence. The National Catholic Register parsed lessons from his still-young papacy for corporate boardrooms. Vatican journalist Christopher White has already published a book about the beginnings of Leo’s tenure.

The Pope has also quickly been roped into church politics. Conservatives have fawned over his choice to use Pope Benedict XVI’s ceremonial stave and don the traditional red mozzetta. Liberals have hailed his progressive stances on immigration and climate change. The swirl of coverage has already branded him both “woke pontiff” and “the most based Pope ever” within his first month.

Coverage of the Bishop of Rome is now a bona-fide industry, with journalists scrutinizing his every aside, old lecture, and offhand gesture in search of clues about his views on doctrine or culture. The insatiable appetite of American Catholics for papal content exposes the very ills of the modern Church that many observers hope Pope Leo will address. In an age of instant news and constant commentary, the faithful have become conditioned to consume the papacy as spectacle. Yet Leo’s pontificate may offer the chance to recover a quieter, older form of devotion, one less dependent on press conferences and soundbites.

Much speculation already swirls around the possibility of Leo’s first encyclical. The very name he chose, Leo, evokes Leo XIII, the 19th-century pope who inaugurated Catholic social teaching. Rumors in July suggested that a draft was underway. For many, this promised letter would establish the tone of his papacy.

Yet encyclicals are a relatively new invention. The form only emerged in the 18th century, a late development in a two-millennia-old Church. Leo XIII, writing on “the social question,” made the genre central not only to bishops but to lay Catholics, extending papal reflections on labor, marriage, and political economy to the faithful worldwide.

Since then, Catholics have been trained to be attentive to these orations of the Holy Father. Encyclicals have shaped how modern popes define themselves; allowing the pontiff to weigh in on world wars, technological change, or theological debates. Even so, the fixation on a pope’s every published word is a more recent habit still, driven by the modern global media.

The figure of the pope as a global celebrity is itself a modern creation. At Yalta in 1945, Stalin famously scoffed at the Vatican’s relevance, asking, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Four decades later, the answer was evident. John Paul II, a son of Stalin’s Poland, made the papacy visible in a way impossible for his predecessors. He became, as Newsweek put it, “the world’s most recognizable person,” drawing vast crowds on his many foreign trips and recasting the papacy as both spiritual office and global platform. Central to this transformation was his deft use of modern media. “If it doesn’t happen on television, it doesn’t happen,” he reportedly told a Vatican official.

John Paul’s media savvy created a problem. His deftness with crowds and cameras instilled a kind of dependency; a syndrome in which Catholics, and the press that covered them, came to expect every pope to be a John Paul: magnetic, quotable, and perpetually on stage. 

No one bore the consequences of this syndrome more than Pope Francis. His tendency to speak off the cuff made him especially vulnerable to a media cycle hungry for stray remarks. In 2013, his casual “Who am I to judge?”, an aside about a Vatican official revealed to be gay, was elevated into a defining slogan of his early papacy. A decade later, when he used a homophobic slur in a private exchange with Italian seminarians, the same media apparatus seized on it with equal fervor. Francis’ finest moments as pope were often overshadowed by these verbal slippages, faithfully amplified by the global press.

As Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate finds its footing, we should remember that the chatty, media-savvy pope is a modern invention, not a Catholic necessity. The norms established by Leo XIII and John Paul II need not define the papacy today. For centuries the office was distant, even obscure. Rediscovering that distance might be the healthiest move Catholics could make, for both themselves and their pontiff. Better to let Leo govern, let the papacy breathe, and recover the more difficult, less glamorous work of faith, what Paul called “working out our salvation with fear and trembling.”

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