The Expat Pope

How will the first U.S. pope's long years living abroad shape his worldview?

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost hadn’t yet made his public debut as Pope Leo XIV on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica when Vatican watchers were seizing on clues to what kind of pontiff, the first-ever from the United States, might be. His choice of “pope name” provided a natural, first inkling. The last pope to choose that name, Leo XIII, whose papacy spanned a quarter of a century, lasting into the first years of the 20^th Century, had championed the cause of social justice for workers. And the cardinal’s tweets and retweets – relatively scarce in recent years – were scoured for more clues, with his advocacy of the Church’s concern for migrants evident.

But another clue to the kind of pastor to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics that this pope, the Church’s 267^th, might be, is a life experience that spanned much of his church career — Prevost was, among other things for many years, an expat.

Dispatched by his Augustinian order to Peru as a missionary while in his early 30s, Prevost, a native Chicagoan, spent a good dozen years in that South American country. Then, after taking some steps up the church career ladder, Prevost would spend several more years in Peru as a bishop appointed by Pope Francis, his late predecessor, before the American would take up key posts at the Vatican.

The U.S. prelate has now traded his cardinal’s red hat for papal headgear

Expats have a kind of privileged vantage point on the world. They bring their own cultural background to a new land, and, depending on why they chose to live abroad in the first place – work, family, study, or plain curiosity -- have a variety of opportunities to learn from, make friends with and appreciate the local population.

In my many years as an American expat in Italy, I came to observe essentially two kinds of my compatriots: those who welcomed and sought out intermingling with natives and those who tended, by choice or by the short nature of their assignment abroad, to try to recreate American life abroad. Some sent their children to local public schools, others to English-language ones. Some sought out containers of the likes of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the commissaries of embassies or U.N. agencies in Rome, while others made their neighborhood gelateria their go-to place for a fix of freshly made gelato.

During his years of church service in Peru, the future Leo XIV became a dual citizen, adding Peruvian citizenship to his official identity.

An insight to the new pope’s world view could be his choice of languages when he delivered his first ever papal remarks to the crowd in St Peter’s Square, which, by the time he was officially presented to the faithful and to the curious, had swollen to a mass of tens of thousands of people.

A virtual prerequisite for rising up in the Vatican hierarchy is a solid working knowledge of Italian. In recent decades, skills in the ancient language of Latin have widely deteriorated, even among higher-ranking churchmen, and Italian prelates traditionally ran the Vatican bureaucracy. Leo’s Italian flowed fluently, with a slight U.S. accent detectable. Leo also addressed the crowd in Spanish, including with an affectionate greeting to his “beloved” diocese back in Peru, an acknowledgement of the importance of the Peruvian people to him. But Leo uttered nary a word in English.

His language choice might be taken as a signal that that he prefers to be seen as pope of the Universal Church, as the Catholic faith describes itself, and not as a U.S. pope, as history-making as his election in the conclave was.

As his papacy plays out, Vatican experts and rank-and-file faithful can decide: Is he more progressive than his predecessor? Tilting more to moderation? More accommodating to a conservative wing of clergy and their sympathizers in the pews, particularly in the United States? By their nature, institutions tend to be conservative, to keep themselves going, and the Catholic Church has two millennia of history. What is deemed progressive in a pope’s deeds or words might seem as barely moving the needle in other contexts.

But for someone so imbedded in life abroad for many years, where those who knew him were impressed by his attention to Peru’s people, especially the poor, Pope Leo XIV’s worldview could well be steeped in good part in an expat’s invaluable perspective.