A geographically and ideologically diverse papal conclave finished its work in two days and four rounds of voting, elevating Cardinal Robert Prevost to the papacy and inaugurating the pontificate of Leo XIV. He is the first U.S.-born pope, but as the Vatican itself made clear, the second American pope, after his Argentinian predecessor. Signs of continuity with Francis’s papacy soon emerged, to the delight of some and the dismay of others—including no small number of Prevost’s native compatriots. Leo pointedly used the words “synodality” and “dialogue.” He forcefully restated the Christian obligation to care for the vulnerable and called for renewal of “our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.” He quoted Francis’s Evangelii gaudium, highlighting the document’s emphasis on “the return to the primacy of Christ in proclamation”; collegiality and synodality; attention to the sensus fidei, including popular piety; care for the least and the rejected; and “dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities.”

Then there is the new pope’s chosen name, which he said was inspired by the last Leo—the nineteenth-century pontiff who founded modern Catholic social teaching. Leo XIV made it clear that he intends to apply his namesake’s ideas to some of the twenty-first century’s most pressing concerns. “Pope Leo XIII addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Leo XIV explained. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” Drawing on Leo XIII’s historic encyclical Rerum novarum to confront the unprecedented and unpredictable impacts of AI lends doctrinal heft and urgency to an effort that, perhaps understandably, has lacked a clear organizing principle until now. It is also inspiring: there is indeed a wealth of Catholic social teaching for the new pope to draw from and for many more people around the world to be made aware of.

Prevost’s cosmopolitan biography (though born and raised in Chicago, he spent decades as a missionary in Peru, where he became a bishop, and later headed a dicastery in the Vatican), along with the Trump administration’s abandonment of the postwar global order, complicates the notion of what an “American pope” means for the Church and the world. Inevitably, his election has been viewed in this country largely through the lens of partisan politics. Was it a rebuke to Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, whom the administration refers to as “the first Catholic convert vice president” but whose views are so often at odds with Church teaching? Or was it a promising reset from the “woke radicalism” of the previous pontificate? Photos of Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with the new pope after his inaugural Mass prompted fresh speculation over whose side Leo XIV might be taking. It’s a symptom of American narcissism that we believe the election of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to be all about us. Catholic doctrine, as many have pointed out, does not map neatly onto American partisan politics. The College of Cardinals, guided by the Holy Spirit, was not, as one member put it, engaged in a continuation of last year’s presidential election.

Nevertheless, it is hard not to look at the selection of Prevost in the context of the global political environment. “The pope acts out an idea of what good authority looks like,” Fintan O’Toole wrote recently in The New York Review of Books. At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide, Leo’s remarks about peace, justice, and truth provide a much-needed example of moral leadership. Fostering a climate of peace, he said in a May address to the Vatican Diplomatic Corps, “demands a genuine willingness to engage in dialogue, inspired by the desire to communicate rather than clash.” The Holy See, he insisted, “cannot fail to make its voice heard in the face of the many imbalances and injustices that lead to unworthy working conditions and increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden societies.” Truth, he noted, “does not create division, but rather enables us to confront all the more resolutely the challenges of our time, such as migration, the ethical use of artificial intelligence, and the protection of our beloved planet Earth.” Yes, these are only words, and not so different from the words of other popes. Yet they now come as a welcome and necessary counterpoint to the rhetoric that authoritarian figures in many countries, including ours, use to justify their assaults on democracy and human rights.

Speculation, often accompanied by projection, runs rampant in the opening days of a papacy. Leo will no doubt confound the hopes of some and defy the expectations of others. Conservative and progressive Catholics alike are bound to experience vindication—and disappointment. Which is just as it should be: the pope is the leader of all Catholics, here and across the world. It is therefore worth underscoring what the new one declared in his first homily: “God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles, and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator for the sake of the entire mystical Body of the Church.”