What happened at the 2025 conclave, and what can it tell us about the path the Catholic Church is now on? And is it too soon to ask? Yes, because the dust is still settling, especially on Leo XIV’s ripening Petrine ministry; he has shown himself keen to listen and learn before acting. Where Francis was the Great Disruptor, Leo is turning out to be the Patient Consolidator. But then again, perhaps it is not too soon after all—because, as I’ve just illustrated, the first draft of papal history provided by Vatican journalists creates the frames through which the new pontificate is received. Somewhere between their as-it-happens reportage and the carefully researched books that appear a year or two after the white smoke come the “insta-books.” Written in haste to be rushed out a month or two into the new pontificate, they offer a vital first take on the story of the papal election and its fruit. 

I’ve been reading two such insta-books. Both authors are American Catholic journalists attempting to understand the first American pope. Their books are both short (around 150 pages) and digestible. But the narratives they set forth about the papal election are very different from each other. Together, they point to the space now being claimed by the polarized U.S. Church. Their differences of focus reveal the hermeneutics involved in the reception of the 2025 conclave. It is for readers to decide which of the two narratives tells the truer tale.

After being sent to Rome in August 2021 by the National Catholic Reporter, where he spent a stint as its national correspondent, Christopher White swiftly established himself as one of the most authoritative English-language Vatican reporters. (He has now left Rome to take up a new role at Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. Full disclosure: we are old friends). His Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy, published by the Jesuit-owned Loyola Press, handsomely delivers on its promise to recount the papal transition from the inside. White’s contacts are superb: he knows and has the confidence of a large number of the cardinals involved and spoke to many of them on and off the record, both before and after the conclave. He can reveal fascinating and delightful details. But more importantly, he can track what they were thinking and can therefore explain why they clustered so quickly around Robert Prevost. He does not have to do an after-the-facts reconstruction, for he guessed correctly at the time. 

This point alone gives White’s book a natural authority. Whatever his own views and biases, he is first of all a great reporter and an acute analyst whose primary task is to understand what it is happening and why. In addition to his written reports for the National Catholic Reporter, he was one of NBC’s conclave pundits, alongside Bishop Robert Barron. When the white smoke rushed out of the Sistine Chapel’s chimney after just four ballots, Barron told White on their rooftop broadcast perch that this clearly meant it would be Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state. White recalls: “When I told him my gut was going with Prevost, he laughed, dismissing the notion as a fantasy that there could ever be a pope from the United States.” White tells the story to illustrate how widespread and firmly embedded was the assumption that the pope could not be American. But it also shows that Barron, the media-savvy founder of Word on Fire, was detached from the inner workings of the conclave while White was plugged into them. 

 More importantly, White is right about the question the cardinal electors were asking: What is the legacy of the twelve-year Francis era? White’s premise is that it was massively consequential, and that any new pope would need to define himself in relation to it. The analogy he makes in the preface is to the 1963 conclave that came after the death of John XXIII. John’s pontificate may have been brief, but it started a great reform that overturned the status quo; the question for the cardinals in that conclave was whether, and how, to press on with that reform. Their choice of Paul VI continued, deepened, and consolidated the Second Vatican Council. In the same way, White suggests, the choice of Leo signals that the cardinals have decided to continue down the road of synodality and pastoral conversion to which Pope Francis committed the Church during his pontificate. The 2025 conclave was therefore a verdict on Francis’s own reception of Vatican II in terms largely defined by the Latin American Church. To say that the cardinals chose Leo in order to continue Francis’s reform agenda is not to deny or minimize Leo’s singularity; he is obviously different from Francis in style and temperament. As the pro-Francis cardinals made clear, they were not looking for a photocopy—nor would they have found one if they had been looking. But they saw Leo as part of that Latin American reception of the Council, which is very different from both conservative and liberal Catholicism in Europe and the United States.

The first part of White’s book deftly assesses the Francis legacy: what he set out to do, what he did and why, where he led the way, and where he fell short. In the second part, White reveals what is to most people mysterious: the internal dynamics of the papal election, which primarily play out in discussions among the cardinals after they arrive in Rome and before the doors of the Sistine Chapel are closed. Conscious of how the powerful liturgical drama of the interregnum—the lying-in-state of the deceased pope, the funeral, the Mass pro eligendo Papa—impacts the minds of the cardinals, White gives a fascinating account of what happened after Francis’s death on Easter Monday, April 21, what was in the cardinals’ hearts during the lead-up to the funeral the following Saturday, April 26, and how their collective discernment developed in the ten-day period prior to the conclave that elected Leo on May 8. White analyzes the fault lines and frontrunners that emerged from the cardinals’ meetings as they weighed Francis’s legacy and looked forward to the next chapter of the Petrine ministry. As good storytellers do, he saves the conclave itself for the conclusion of the book’s third and final part, “From Chicago to Rome,” which briefly covers Leo’s life up to and including the past two years, which he spent working at the Vatican. White’s fascinating account of how Leo was elected chimes well with details that have been leaked since the book went to press. He ends the book with some tentative predictions about what the Leonine era may bring—predictions based both on Leo’s past and his first week as pope. 

As its title suggests, Matthew Bunson’s Leo XIV: Portrait of the first American Pope, published by the Catholic media conglomerate EWTN, focuses much less on the election process than on the pope who emerged from it. This plays to Bunson’s strengths, for he is neither Rome-based nor a Vaticanist. The vice president and editorial director of EWTN News, a former senior editor for National Catholic Register and Our Sunday Visitor, Bunson is the author of encyclopedias on popes, saints, and the Middle Ages, and has previous experience turning out insta-biographies of popes—he wrote one for Benedict XVI in 2005 and one for Francis in 2013. The format is somewhat boilerplate: a potted life story in a mildly hagiographic vein. Although he commentated for EWTN in Rome during the transition, Bunson does not seem very interested in the dynamics of the conclave itself, which are efficiently disposed of in his preface with a single line: Leo “was chosen by the cardinals because he is a bridge-builder to authentic peace, in keeping with the traditional title and symbol of the papacy—pontifex.” We are not told why that might be important to the cardinals at this particular time, or what peace in these circumstances might mean. Indeed, the reader is given no real context for the election. Leo just appears, suddenly, the Holy Spirit’s clear choice. 

Bunson’s book is also divided into three parts, organized around three important places in Leo’s life: Chicago, where Robert Prevost grew up and entered the Augustinians; Peru, where he missioned as an Augustinian in his thirties and forties and where he returned as bishop in 2014; and finally Rome, where he received his formation in canon law, served as Prior General of the Augustinians, and returned in 2023 when Francis made him head of the dicastery that appoints and deals with bishops. Unlike White, Bunson provides a comprehensive biography, and his book’s strength is its plentiful details. He notices, for example, something that many have overlooked—that Prevost arrived to mission in Peru in 1985, when the rural poor were caught in the crossfire between the scorched-earth violence of a Maoist guerrilla group known as Shining Path and Alberto Fujimori’s government crackdown, which combatted the guerrillas by torturing and massacring them. Prevost, according to Bunson, was openly critical of both sides. 

Bunson’s decision to construct his narrative around those three geographical nodes of Chicago, Rome, and Peru does not, however, make for an easy read. Because Prevost returned to each of these places at different stages of his life, the story lurches between chronology and geography, leaving this reader longing for a timeline. And because the level of detail is generally so impressive, the lacunae stand out starkly. It became clear early on in my reading that the missing element in Bunson’s account of Prevost’s evolution is none other than Pope Francis. It is not just that Bunson offers no evaluation of Francis’s pontificate; it’s also that Francis is missing from Prevost’s life story as Bunson tells it. He hovers as a ghost over the book, often waiting around the next corner of the story but fled from immediately, as if evidence of a Prevost-Bergoglio bond might tarnish the conservative dream of Leo as a clean break from his predecessor. 

EWTN’s opposition to Francis was axiomatic, symbolized by The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, a relentlessly vitriolic and quasi-schismatic weekly news program. This is surely what Francis had in mind when he famously described a major U.S. Catholic network as doing the devil’s work of division. EWTN’s newspaper, the National Catholic Register, and its Catholic News Agency, were similarly ill-disposed toward Francis. But EWTN News was far more restrained. As its editorial director, Bunson reflects what might be called the “irenic” division of that conglomerate, one that still clings to the notion—vanishingly rare these days on the U.S. Catholic right—that the papacy is deserving of some deference from the faithful. For the irenic conservatives, open attacks on Francis are distasteful and imprudent. They would prefer to treat the Francis era as a painful interlude to be passed swiftly over, with a firm determination to look ahead. This is essentially what drives Bunson’s narrative: the ill-disguised hope that Leo will draw a line under the whole episode. Such a narrative depends on minimizing the part Bergoglio played in the story of Prevost. 

There may be more to it than that, however, in the case of the Sodalicio, as it is known in Peru. Bunson chooses to entirely ignore Prevost’s taking the side of victims against the abusive right-wing Peruvian Sodalitium de Vitae Christianae (SCV) while bishop of Chiclayo and passes over his role in assisting the journalists hounded by the movement, who he arranged a meeting for with Francis. Nor is there any mention of the major role Prevost played in Francis’s expulsion of the SCV’s leaders and in his shutting down of the organization shortly before his death. All these stories, mentioned by White, surfaced just after the conclave, when one of the journalists involved, Paola Ugaz, was in Rome and warmly greeted Leo as an old friend. Bunson must have known the details of this case when writing his book, which raises the question of whether corporate considerations prevailed. EWTN’s own links with the SCV are well known: the corporation bought the SCV’s news agency, ACI Prensa, and for many years employed its head, Alejandro Bermúdez, as head of its Colorado-based Catholic News Agency. Bermúdez was one of the leaders expelled from the SCV by Pope Francis for abuse. 

Bunson’s portrait of the new pope suffers from its determination to ignore Prevost’s close bond with Francis. White, by contrast, grasps that this bond is a key part of the story, especially after Francis made the Augustinian a member of the dicastery for clergy in 2019 and of the dicastery for bishops in 2020. On his visits to Rome from Chiclayo, Prevost often had lunch with Francis in his suite in the Santa Marta. On one such visit, Francis told Prevost that he might appoint him as bishops’ prefect. Shortly after giving him that role in April 2023, Francis made Prevost a cardinal, and the two men spent every Saturday morning together discussing not just episcopal appointments but “bigger issues facing the Church.” Unlike Bunson, White provides great detail on Prevost’s impact and activities in Rome, including the reforms he carried out in his dicastery, overhauling, for example, the formation given to new bishops. But he also quotes extensively from Prevost’s own words about the impact Francis had on him. Even though Bunson draws on the same sources (not least a talk Prevost gave last year in a Chicago-area parish), he passes over all this, noting simply what his duties were in the Vatican. 

Just as Bunson overlooks the impact Francis had on Prevost, he also minimizes Francis’s impact on the whole Church. But trying to tell the story of Leo without reference to Francis’s influence on him and others results in a lopsided account. For example, Bunson (rightly) makes much of Prevost’s speech at the new evangelization synod of 2012 called by Benedict XVI, in which Prevost, then prior general, lamented, among other things, the media’s promotion of a “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” Bunson says these remarks reveal Prevost to be a man “not looking to compromise with modern secularism,” someone who regards the modern West as “mission territory.” But he overlooks an interview Prevost gave in 2023 after being made a cardinal. Asked about his remarks a decade earlier, he said there had been under Francis a “development in the sense of the need for the Church to be open and welcoming,” and that while doctrine had not changed, “we are looking to be more welcoming and more open, and to say all people are welcome in the Church.” That is a striking change of emphasis and shift in Leo’s thinking, which Bunson ignores.

More tellingly, Bunson skips over Prevost’s involvement in the concluding synodal assemblies of October 2014 and 2015, in which White discovers a rich mine of clues to the new pope’s thinking. Interviewing a number of people who sat at Prevost’s table in those assemblies, White is able to offer fascinating sketches of the new pope’s modus operandi (though I was surprised that White passes over a press conference on October 23, 2024, when Prevost spoke of the need to make the selection of bishops more synodal and consultative—he then participated in a study group that worked out ways to do this). Prevost’s involvement in the synod matters, not only because of the personal qualities his interventions revealed, but also because he showed himself a true believer in the key part of Francis’s legacy at contention in the conclave, synodality. White shows that Prevost had been synodal for decades, in a way typical of the Latin American pastoral Church. As early as the 1980s, Prevost was talking about the Church as the “People of God,” wholeheartedly embracing co-responsibility between the clergy and the laity, and introducing lay formation programs. After he was named bishop in 2015, this formation for lay leaders would become a hallmark of Prevost’s leadership in Chiclayo, a formation based on the major documents of the Francis era—a radical departure for a diocese previously run by Spanish Opus Dei bishops.

Leo’s commitment to synodality was immediately apparent on the balcony of St. Peter’s the day of his election as pope. There, he spoke of a “Church open to all” and his desire for a “synodal Church,” and in the following days he made a point of reaffirming his commitment to Francis’s path of synodal conversion. (He has since approved a document by the synod council outlining a three-year reception of the Final Document.) For White, synodality was central to the conclave result: the vast majority of cardinal electors sought to deepen Francis’s program of ecclesial conversion and in Prevost they had found a person who could do that, but with a greater emphasis on collegiality. White reports that the cardinals were seeking a man with proven governance experience to bring synodality and collegiality to the Curia itself—a task they felt Francis never got to. It was the Latin American support for Prevost in the runup to the conclave that alerted White to his prospects. The cardinals of that continent had seen Prevost in action as vice president of the Peruvian bishops’ conference and as ordinary of Chiclayo. 

Bunson barely mentions synodality and always in scare quotes, as if it were a foreign object in the ecclesial body that has yet to be certified safe. It isn’t clear what he means when he writes that Prevost “supported synodality but in a measured way.” A clue comes earlier in the book, when Bunson describes how Prevost made difficult decisions as prior general by listening carefully to everyone in ways that left people feeling seen and heard. This, Bunson declares, is “a model of so-called ‘synodality’ that simultaneously listens to concerns in a democratic way but decides in a hierarchical way,” one that respects “the distinct role of spiritual leaders in the Church.” But what Bunson does not explain is that the documents of the Synod on Synodality, the International Theological Commission (ITC) document of 2018, Francis’s speeches, and the apostolic constitution Episcopalis communio all affirm just this—that bishops are the final decision-makers, that synodality does not contradict episcopal authority but bolsters it. 

One wonders, too, where Bunson finds evidence for his claim that Prevost’s experience as a canon lawyer was a factor in his election, for “he could help to clarify many of the points of confusion or uncertainty created by the tidal wave of new laws and changes to canon law made by the late pontiff.” I have read many interviews with cardinal electors after the conclave, and I can’t think of one who reported that this was a factor. Bunson offers no source. It sounds like the kind of thing said over cigars at the anti-Francis gatherings of wealthy American philanthropists and conservative activists, who were wining and dining cardinals before the conclave in the hope of getting them to elect the Hungarian cardinal Peter Erdö as pope. 

Which brings us to White’s conversation with Prevost in July 2023, when the cardinal quizzed the reporter about what fuels the resistance to Francis in the United States. Prevost told White that Francis’s critiques of unbridled market capitalism had rankled many American Catholics. White notes that the last Leo, the late-nineteenth-century Leo XIII, condemned the heresy of Americanism—with its hyper-individualism—just eight years after calling for a just wage and recognizing the right of workers to unionize and strike in Rerum novarum (1891). This new Leo, White suggests, may be just as robust in challenging the United States, which, now that Trump has abandoned multilateralism, is no longer any kind of Vatican foreign-policy partner.

Bunson is also impressed by Leo and has high hopes for him, not least because of the “sense of clarity and mission” he radiated from the balcony of St. Peter’s. Bunson is glad that Leo’s decision to don the traditional mozzetta and stole that day—famously abandoned by Francis after his own election—has visibly connected his pontificate with “the long customs and symbols of the papacy and the Church.” Bunson does not explicitly criticize Francis on this point, but his relief is palpable. He then adds: “Our new Holy Father seems convinced that the road ahead for the Church and the world will be paved by hearing and applying the timeless teachings of the Church in new situations and circumstances.” I reread this sentence a number of times, but failed to imagine a pope—any pope, in almost any era—of whom this could not be said.

Bunson is on firmer ground when he argues that Leo, as a former missionary, is aware that the West is now mission territory. The new pope has had direct experience of what, throughout his book, Bunson laments and critiques as a Catholic decline. But there is no awareness of the possibility that the Church may now be on the cusp of a new age of apostolic simplicity and humility of the sort recommended by the Latin American bishops at the Aparecida Conference in 2007. Bunson seems to prefer the more Eurocentric model of John Paul II’s New Evangelization, and tries to fit Leo into it, just as George Weigel, the Polish pope’s biographer, tried to fit Francis into that same paradigm back in 2013. Neither sees that the Church is now in a new global era, one shaped by Latin America, Asia, and Africa. White gets that Leo is part of that new story; Bunson does not. 

Both authors have put in many hours of research and produced readable first takes on Leo’s papacy. Of the two, White’s offers a richer, more textured and intimate portrait of Leo, even though it is less of a conventional biography than Bunson’s book. From Bunson, we get a story of conservative American hopes for a papacy that will bury the Francis era and reverse the Church’s institutional decline in the West. It is a story for which there will be a ready market, but I doubt it will stand the test of time. White’s, on the other hand, tells a story that is not just well presented but essentially sound, and will prove durable even as bigger, more detailed biographies emerge. This is the story of Francis charting a new course for the Church, one that will allow it to evangelize in a new era; it’s the story of the cardinals coming together after Francis’s death to look for someone who would pursue that same course, but in his own style; and, finally, it’s the story of their finding Leo, a missionary pope who understands the challenge ahead and can better connect Francis’s project with the Anglo-Saxon world.

Pope Leo XIV
Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy
Christopher White
Loyola Press
$19.99 | 154 pp. 

Leo XIV
Portrait of the First American Pope
Matthew Bunson
EWTN
$17.95 | 137 pp.