ROME – Almost twenty years ago, I found myself seated at a lunch table during a Catholic conference next to Italian Archbishop Pietro Sambi, who at the time was the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States. Just to make good table conversation, at one point I asked for his basic impression of American Catholicism.

His answer was as memorable as it was epigrammatic.

“To be pro-life, you must be against abortion,” he said. “But being against abortion is not enough to be pro-life.”

Sambi’s point was that, in his experience, a not inconsiderable number of American Catholics seem to have a hard time understanding that point.

That memory came back this week, watching Americans react to comments by Pope Leo XIV on what it means to be pro-life in a brief session Tuesday evening with reporters outside his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” the pontiff said. “Someone who says that I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants here in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

“They’re very complex issues,” Leo said, adding, “I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them.”

Stunned American Catholic commentators have spent most of the past week parsing and spinning those comments. The Catholic right has been divided between those inclined to try to explain away the pope’s language, and those insisting he was just flat wrong.

The latter was the reaction of Raymond Arroyo, who said on Fox News: “You can’t say a grave, always evil act like abortion is on the same par with unfettered immigration or the death penalty … The Holy Father has a clean-up act to do here.”

The American Catholic left, meanwhile, has been gripped by a paroxysm of delight.

Plenty of liberals have concluded that Leo was deliberately tweaking the militantly anti-abortion conservative wing of the American church, and some have even deliriously suggested that with his comments, Leo has emerged as the “anti-Trump,” meaning the leading American alternative to the MAGA movement.

By way of contrast, media cultures in most other parts of the world – Italy, for example, where I live, and the rest of Western Europe, along with most of Africa, Latin American and Asia – didn’t really make much of the pope’s “pro-life” analysis at all. Some briefly covered the initial comments, others ignored them, but there has been no similar torrent of analysis and interpretation as in the United States.

How to explain the geyser of reaction in the States and the relative indifference in most other places?

In part, of course, it’s because the pope was being asked to respond to an American situation. The question, by EWTN journalist Valentina Di Donato, concerned plans by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago to present a lifetime achievement award to U.S. Senator Dick Durban of Illinois for his advocacy of behalf of immigrants. That plan generated controversy because of Durban’s pro-choice voting record, and roughly a dozen U.S. bishops spoke out against it.

Naturally, American commentators would be more attuned to what the pope had to say than others.

However, that’s not the only explanation.

The plain fact of the matter is that Catholic cultures in most other parts of the world simply aren’t as obsessed with abortion as in the United States. In Western Europe, the decision in favor of the legalization of abortion was largely settled in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and since that time abortion has been off the table as a live social concern. Political parties don’t talk about it, media outlets don’t talk about it, ordinary people by and large don’t bring it up, and so the church has developed other priorities.

For the Catholic right in many Western European nations, those defining concerns include opposition to Muslim integration and the defense of Christian identity, as well as skepticism about the European Union. For the Catholic left, they’ve become advocacy of immigration, opposition to climate change, and critiques of free market global capitalism.

In much of Latin America and Africa, the situation is reversed in that abortion is largely illegal and there’s no serious social movement to change the situation. Yet the effect is the same, in that abortion is largely absent as a matter of live political concern, so everyone, including the church, has developed other talking points.

Only in the United States does abortion remain an unsettled, constantly evolving issue that defines our political and cultural divides. As a result, the church in the United States is compelled to devote a far greater share of energy and attention to the abortion issue than virtually anywhere else on the planet. Abortion in America is also low-hanging fruit for demagogues of all stripes who wish to excite their base.

On the one hand, this energy means American Catholicism is the global pacesetter in terms of anti-abortion arguments, strategies and commitment. Defending the unborn is the pride of the American church.

On the other hand, it means that American Catholics, especially those most convinced of the anti-abortion position, often have a hard time understanding that there’s more to the church’s pro-life teaching. What comes naturally and instinctively to Catholics virtually anywhere else on earth is often a stretch for Americans.

In that context, it’s worth remembering that although Pope Leo was born and grew up in America, he spent almost his entire adult life either in Peru (where abortion has been illegal, except in cases of threats to the life and health of the mother, for a century) or in Italy (where abortion has been basically legal in the first trimester since 1978.) To him, the notion that “pro-life” implies a range of commitments, not just opposition to abortion, must seem intuitive and obvious.

What does all this mean?

For many Americans, what Leo said about being pro-life seemed a bold political stance. Yet for him, and for all those Catholics whose instincts and outlooks have been forged outside the United States, it was classic Catholic social teaching — and, therefore, just basic pastoral common sense.