In case you hadn’t heard, the cardinals elected Pope Leo XIV to succeed Pope Francis to the See of Peter.

Born Robert Francis Prevost, the Augustinian missionary priest who served as prior general of his Augustinian order in Rome and was bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, came late to the Vatican – in 2023 – when the recently departed Pope Francis made him prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and gave him the red hat.

There is little without precedent in the Catholic Church, but it is fair to say nothing exactly like this has happened before and safe to say it took Church watchers quite by surprise.

Hard power, soft power

Conventional wisdom had it that cardinals would not pick a fellow from the United States because it would combine the “soft power” of the papal office with the “hard power” of US political (economic, military, and cultural) clout in unhealthy ways.

The concern was real, and not without precedent.

For most of the fourteenth century, the pope and eventually his whole court and government were removed to the French town of Avignon. The Avignon papacy began as an expedient arranged by the king of France – then the ascendant power in Europe – to break a deadlocked conclave. It quickly developed into what came to be known as the “Avignon Captivity” (and sometimes “Babylonian Captivity”) and lasted the better part of seven decades, from 1309-1376.

The fear had been, in essence, that bringing Avignon to the papacy would be as bad or worse than bringing the papacy to Avignon.

The late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has been widely quoted through the years as saying the election of a pope from the United States would not happen until the US enters political decline. Would-be readers of the signs of the times will now be wondering whether we have witnessed the jettison of that homespun wisdom or the fulfilment of a prophecy, or perhaps both.

What’s in a name?

In any case, there’s a great deal in the name: Leo.

The last Leo was Leo XIII, the father of Catholic Social Teaching in the modern era, who gave the Church and the world the seminal encyclical letter, Rerum novarum, on the rights and duties of capital and labor, in the heady days of the industrial revolution.

Cardinal Ladislav Nemet, who dined with Pope Leo XIV on Thursday evening – the night of Leo’s election – told HRT Croatian Radio the pope is keenly sensible of the digital revolution unfolding in the 21^st century.

“[Pope Leo] said that we are inside a new revolution,” Nemet said. “In Leo XIII’s time there was an industrial revolution going on,” Nemet said, “now there is a digital revolution going on.”

As Crux’s Charles Collins astutely noted in the days before the conclave, the media coverage – the reportage of cardinals’ remarks, the analysis, and the punditry – strongly suggested the cardinals would be asking themselves questions focused on the supposed conservative / liberal divide epitomized by debates over “traditional values” and Latin Masses on one side, or gay marriage and women clergy on the other.

In a word: The debates of the bottom half of the 20^th century. “The first part of the 21^st century sees a society questioning what it means to be human,” Collins wrote, “with ‘post-humanism’ being pushed by the leaders of many technology firms.”

If those early indications suggested the new pope agrees, Leo himself removed any possible lingering doubt when he addressed the whole College of Cardinals gathered in the New Synod Hall on Saturday morning.

“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo XIV said.

“Today,” Leo continued, “the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.”

Ad intra, ad extra

Much has been made of Pope Leo XIV’s service as a missionary priest and as a bishop in an impoverished part of the global south, as well as of his administrative leadership roles in both the Order of Saint Augustine of which he was prior general and in Rome as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.

All of that certainly played an important part in the cardinals’ discernment.

That Leo XIV is a canonist of some repute is more important than one might think if one were to judge by the early commentary, especially in light of the state of law in the Church after Pope Francis.

One of the criticisms levied by senior churchmen during the reign of Francis – often privately, but across the whole broad spectrum of opinion in the Church – was that Francis was not the most careful or orderly legislator ever to sit on the throne of Peter.

Pope Francis’s 2015 structural reform of marriage tribunals, for example, was not universally well received. Francis’s piecemeal reform of the Roman curia was long on theory but lacked the attention to practical detail as would put the Church’s central governing apparatus in form for 21^st century action.

Pope Francis liked to issue legal decrees to solve particular problems. That way of going about things may or may not deal handily with the problem to hand but always tends to create difficulty down the line. Francis issued scores of Apostolic Letters motu proprio – on his own initiative – throughout his pontificate, at the rate of roughly five per year.

To give you some perspective: Pope St. John Paul II issued thirty-one motu proprio in all the twenty-six years of his reign. Francis had topped that by the end of his fifth year in office and never really slowed the pace until the end.

The single most important legislative reform of the Francis pontificate was Vos estis lux mundi, a sweeping 2019 law that – on paper, at least – strengthened the process of investigating abuse and coverup allegations and provided a procedural framework for their judicial prosecution at Church law.

Pope Francis, whose own pontificate was bedeviled by cases of frequently alarming mismanagement, proved reluctant to use the law with any meaningful regularity or transparency.

The cardinals knew going in, that the man they picked would have to put things in order.

Skeletons out of the closet

One thing observers noted almost immediately was that Leo XIV has an imperfect record on handling cases of abuse and coverup.

Some of the accusations he has faced come from quarters highly questionable for their credibility and received a review that appears to have exonerated then-Cardinal Prevost.

One allegation of grave mismanagement appears to be well founded.

That allegation is related to the case of Fr. James Ray, an abuser-priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Then-Fr. Prevost OSA, who was provincial head of the Augustinians in Chicago in the year 2000 allowed Ray – who had allegations against him and had been on restricted ministry for nearly a decade – to live (or did not prevent him from living) in a house belonging to his Order of Saint Augustine.

The Archdiocese of Chicago had reportedly noted the restrictions when they requested hospitality for Ray in the Augustinians’ house, which was situated very near an elementary school. Then-Fr. Prevost apparently never alerted the school, nor caused the school to be alerted.

The episode with Ray, it is important to note, happened two years before the crisis of abuse and coverup exploded into global scandal. That eruption started in Boston in 2002, but it could have started almost anywhere. The scandal quickly engulfed the whole United States before it spread worldwide.

The crisis of abuse and coverup is not only part of the Church’s recent history but is of very long standing. It is certainly part of the Church’s present. One of the Church’s leading experts on the crisis, Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, has said we will not live to see the end of it.

“This will not be over in our lifetime,” Zollner said in March of 2019, “at least in countries where they have not yet started to talk about it.” The crisis was with us in the year 2000, but the scandal – and the awareness the scandal compelled – was only dimly on the horizon.

Make no mistake: The episode was a failure and put people in danger.

Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org issued a statement calling Leo’s record on abuse “troubling” with “one exception,” the suppression of the abusive Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, on which Crux has reported extensively (and even earned a sit-down with Pope Francis, who suppressed the group in 2024).

“Pedro Salinas, the survivor who blew the whistle on Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV),” said Barrett Doyle, “credits Prevost with playing ‘an extremely important role’ in getting the cult [sic] suppressed,” when then-Cardinal Prevost was prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome.

Nevertheless, Barrett Doyle said in her statement, Pope Leo XIV will have to prove himself willing and capable of leadership in these regards.

“It is on Pope Leo XIV to win the trust of victims and their families,” she said.

Prevost’s imperfect record on abuse may in fact be a sign of much belated awakening among the cardinals. It may demonstrate the cardinals – and the man they elected – finally understanding how abuse and coverup is a key issue, perhaps the key issue: They picked someone whose skeletons are out of the closet, which means they know he will be scrutinized and will have no excuse.

Read in that light, the election of Leo may actually be a sign they take the crisis seriously.

Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri