What We’ve Learned After One Year of Pope Leo’s Papacy

Christopher White was probably one of the few people who was not surprised when Pope Leo XIV walked out on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on May 8, 2025.

Christopher White associate director for strategic initiatives and a senior fellow at Georgetown's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. In October 2025, he presented a copy of his new book to Pope Leo.

As the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, White met then-Bishop Robert Prevost in 2023 when the American cleric arrived in Rome to lead the Dicastery for Bishops.

That encounter in Prevost's small, plain office off St. Peter's Square was the first of many meetings White had with the future pope over the next two years.

After Pope Francis' death in April 2025, White put Prevost on his short list to become pope because he thought the Chicago-born clergyman checked a lot of the boxes the College of Cardinals would look for: someone who understood the needs of the global Church while sharing Francis' welcoming vision for the faith, White said.

"He struck me as a humble, quiet man who always asked smart and serious questions, but he did not strike me as someone who was ambitious by any means," said White, the associate director for strategic initiatives and a senior fellow at Georgetown's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. "He was not someone who was interested in making a name for himself. He was quite happy being in the shadows and doing his work away from the limelight."

When White saw Leo emerge as pope, he felt vindication for his hunch and understood that history was being made with the first American pope.

Last summer, White published a book, Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy, detailing the secretive papal election process and the new pope's vision for the Catholic Church. In October, White met Leo at the Vatican to present a copy of his book.

We sat down with White to discuss key moments from the first year of Leo's papacy and the pope's style in navigating divisive issues around the world.

Key Moments From Pope Leo's First Year and the Future of the Catholic Church

When you learned that the pope chose the name Leo, what was your reaction?

It was loaded because there had been 13 Leos before him, but I immediately knew he'd probably taken his name from Leo XIII, who was, in a sense, the founder of modern Catholic social teaching. He wrote a major document at the end of the 19th century at a time when the world was being embroiled by all sorts of technological changes with the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIII said that the Church had to stand with workers and use its voice to defend their rights. So when Leo XIV took that name, I thought this was a sign that he is attentive to the needs of the world in our own era.

Where does Pope Leo's concern for workers come from, given his background?

Certainly from his time in Peru. As a young priest, he was a missionary in a Catholic diocese in Peru. This was in a very poor region of the country that was witnessing the effects of climate change in an acute way.

He saw a church that was very different from the church he was used to. The church that he grew up with in Chicago was, by Peruvian standards, very wealthy. The church in Peru didn't have a lot of resources and a lot of means, but what they did have was solidarity with the people. He said that it was that experience of being in Peru that taught him what it meant to be a priest. Seeing priests stand alongside and advocate on behalf of the needs of the poor and for the rights of workers and for just wages was formative for his young mind as a priest.

In July 2025, White published a book on the papal conclave and the future of the Church under Pope Leo.

How would you say his concern for the poor and workers manifested itself in the first year of his papacy?

He signaled that he is very much in continuity with Pope Francis in the sense that concern for the poor, the marginalized and the migrants are the front-burner issues for him - that and war and peace.

His first teaching document was a document that Pope Francis had started, and he completed. So in a sense, there were two pens, one voice. And that document said that if you want to call yourself a Christian, you have to lead by showing your concern for the poor. That I think was him tying himself to Francis and, not just Francis, but certainly the Gospels. It was significant that he made that his very first teaching document as a starting point for his papacy.

His first year has been largely marked by a very cautious style of governance. He's not an unscripted individual. He moves through life and now the papacy carefully and with a lot of study and attention to what he's doing and saying.

What would you say have been the major moments of the first year of his papacy?

I'd say there have been a handful of major moments. The first was back in the fall, when he specifically encouraged the U.S. bishops to do more and to speak out more strongly in the face of the Trump administration's mass deportation of migrants. He's not someone who is looking for conflict with the Trump administration or any particular world leader. That's not his style, that's not the style of popes in general. At the same time, he wants to make clear that there are moral principles at stake.

Then I'd also point to just recent weeks and days where he's been one of the most prominent world leaders speaking out against the Iran war and criticizing efforts to use religious justifications for the war. As almost everyone has seen, this led President Trump to go on the attack, and Leo has calmly but resolutely responded by saying he will not be silenced and will continue to preach the Gospel, which is, of course, a message of peace. He also called on American Catholics to call their representatives, which is perhaps the most Chicagoan thing he's done since his election!

In what ways have you seen Pope Leo's American identity show up in his papacy?

Over time, I would say he's eased into the role. He's become more comfortable letting his American shine through. He's speaking English more often. That's a testament to not just his Americanism, but the fact that the Catholic Church is an international global entity, and English is a far more widely spoken language than Italian. He recognizes that, as pope, it helps him use his global megaphone when he speaks in English.

I mentioned the fact that he appealed to Americans to call their congressmen. We hear that sort of language in American political discourse all the time. To hear a pope say it was rather striking.

So many of his points of reference are our points of reference. Here's a pope who has two American brothers who, as Pope Leo has acknowledged, are politically divided. So he knows what it's like to have family on different sides of the political aisle, and he understands how fractured the American political landscape is, not from reading about it but having lived it.

He's our first pope who has ever had his own personal social media account before he became pope. He's a pope who continues to wear an Apple Watch. So in that sense, he's like a lot of people that you might encounter at a Chicago pizzeria. He's not that different from us.

How do you think his experience of navigating political differences in his own family translates to how he approaches his role as pope?

I point to his very first homily at his inaugural Mass, where he laid out two themes of his pontificate: love and unity. I think he feels the weight of the office and sees his role as a unifier, not just in the world, but particularly in the Church. He knows what it's like to have a family that's divided by politics, and he knows what a poison that has often been inside the Church.

I think he's trying to, through his own rhetoric, bring down the temperature. We're obviously seeing him speak out about migrants and seeing him speak out about war, but he's trying to do so by putting the human person at the center of it, by putting their stories front and center and leaning less on partisan politics.

We're just seeing him ease into papal travel. Papal travel is a way to get to see a pope's priorities and personality. [In April] he headed to Africa. It's significant because he started the trip in Algeria to help build bridges between the Catholic and Muslim worlds. Algeria is 99% Muslim, so he wants the trip to lean into the bridge-building nature of his papacy. But in choosing to start in Algeria, it was certainly a nod to his roots as a member of the Augustinian order. It's where St. Augustine is buried. It's a way of showing that he's very much formed by his own experience as an Augustinian.

What we've seen over the last century is explosive growth in Catholicism in Africa. It's a chance for him to extoll the remarkable growth of the African Church and the many ways the Global South can teach the Global North. It's a reminder that our priorities are not always the global Church's priorities. Papal travel is useful because it's a reminder that the Church is a global institution. What is front-burner in one country may not be front-burner in another, and the goal of the pope is to hold all of this together in unity. That's a tremendous responsibility.

How do you think his Augustinian roots have informed his papacy?

Everything about the Augustinian revolves around community life. Community life is central to their existence in the world. What it means for his papacy is he wants to govern a community. He doesn't want to go it alone. He wants to do so through broad consultation.

How would you compare the styles and priorities of Pope Leo and Pope Francis?

Substantively, the two men are quite similar. They're motivated by a vision of a Church that stands with the poor and marginalized. They both recognize that the Church's structures have to be remade and rethought to become more inclusive and more welcoming, where Catholics feel as if they are more heard inside their own Church. On that front, they are cut from the same cloth.

Stylistically, they're very different personalities. Francis was a maverick. He really challenged the system as an outsider who shunned protocol. He was an unscripted individual who thought he could help shake up the Church. For 13 years, he kept everyone on their toes. Leo is different personality-wise. He's much more cautious. He is scripted. I think he's steely in his determination, like Francis, but he's much more predictable in how he goes about things.

The Vatican is a large complex bureaucracy that many people don't fully understand. What have you noticed about how Pope Leo has governed the Vatican?

A year in, he's slowly building his own team. Leo is meeting with a ton of people every day and granting listening sessions to everyone. He's met with some of Pope Francis' biggest detractors, and he's met with some of Francis' biggest fans. He's trying to move cautiously.

The biggest difference, I would say, is the fact that he's a young pope as far as popes are concerned. He was 69 when he was elected; now he's 70. With Francis, you always had the sense that he knew the clock was ticking. Leo's a young man. In Church terms, he could be pope for another 20 years, so he doesn't feel this need to rush.

There has been a lot of reporting on a surge of converts to Catholicism in the last year. How real is this trend, and can it be attributed to Pope Leo?

Let me just say this. A conclave means that for a few weeks, all of the eyes of the world were on the Church. That tends to produce some sort of ripple effect where people, even if they're of no faith or little faith, are intrigued by this institution and what it stands for.

I think it's too soon to know for certain what this will yield and what the long-term effects will be.

As someone who lived through the conclave and covered it in real time, it was a remarkable experience of humanity coming together. There were over 100,000 people present in St. Peter's Square from all over the world, waving flags, chanting, singing songs in every language imaginable.

They were all ready to root for whoever stepped out on that balcony, had he been an American, had he been an Italian, had he been a Filipino, had he been Congolese. In a moment in which we just see widespread division, that was something beautiful to witness.

Editor's Note: Top photograph taken by Edgar Beltrán/The Pillar.