Well, that was a bit of stunning news, huh? After all the speculation about the next pope, the conclave elected someone who wasn’t on the radar for most people.

I don’t remember previous conclaves being as media-saturated as this one. For example, I don’t remember previous opening days being broadcast on television, albeit via the Vatican. Part of this could be due to the popularity of the movie Conclave. And part of it could be that worshipers around the country, if not the world, are more familiar with watching services or other religion-related things via streaming since the Covid pandemic.

And that high level of interest had a big payoff with the announcement that the next pope would be Robert Prevost, both born in the United States and having spent most of his priestly career in Peru. But mostly I wanted to know which direction the Catholic Church would go after Francis.

I was raised Catholic and left the church as an adult because of the all too cavalier attitude toward the pedophilia crisis and the hard right turn the church took in the later years of John Paul II’s term and the attendant rise of Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. I am happily Episcopalian now, and I don’t think I’ll ever return to the Catholic church but I still would like for it to be more welcoming and less judgmental.

Of course we don’t really have an idea of what this papacy will be like. But there are some interesting things about the new pope.

First, like Francis, he belongs to an order, in his case the Augustinian order, whose emphasis is on learning and showing love to others. Most of the Catholic priests I have know who belonged to an order have been Jesuits, and I think there is a difference between the priests who choose to live in a communal life and those who do not.

Second, Leo XIII was the father of the Catholic social justice movement. Among other things, he was the author of Rerum Novarum, an encyclical on the rights and duties of labor and capitalism. I think the new pope’s name is a hopeful sign.

Third, the new pope had joined with Francis to call out the hateful (and heretical) nonsense about the Christian hierarchy of love that JD Vance had espoused:

The internet has been buzzing since Vice President JD Vance said during a Fox News interview on Jan. 29, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

I’ll close with this fantastic clip: