“If,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the most stinging of Protestant put-downs, “a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” It might be said that the mission of the late Pope Francis was to banish that ghost. The big question for his successor, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), is whether his papacy will complete the exorcism or continue to be haunted by the specter of the imperial Church.
The answer matters, obviously, to 1.4 billion Catholics. But it bears heavily too on an issue at the heart of the contemporary crisis of democracy: the nature of authority. In 2023 Prevost said, “We must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today.” While serving as head of the Vatican’s commission on the appointment of bishops he remarked, “The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom.” It seems likely that he also believes the pope is not supposed to be a little emperor sitting in his imperial court. In choosing to elevate him, the 132 other cardinals eligible to vote in the conclave would seem to have had a very particular little emperor in mind: the one in the White House.
The choice of Prevost is a reminder that the Church has not survived for so long without a kind of political genius. Although it is a male gerontocracy, the College of Cardinals has seemed at times to have a sixth sense for the undercurrents of history. Its choice in 1978 of a charismatic Pole, Karol Wojtyła, as Pope John Paul II brilliantly anticipated the fall of the Soviet empire. This time it has made an almost equally bold decision: to create, at a moment of crisis for the US and its place in the world, an alternative model of American global leadership.
The most immediately striking thing about Prevost is that he embodies the hybrid nature of American identity. While Donald Trump has mobilized Nazi rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Prevost’s blood is Afro-Creole, French, Italian, and Spanish. His maternal grandparents were people of color from New Orleans. He is also a Peruvian citizen who has spent much of his life ministering to the kind of people Trump characterizes as “vermin.” When Vice President J.D. Vance suggested to Fox News in January that Christianity prioritizes love for one’s own family and neighbors over love for strangers and foreigners, an X account apparently belonging to Prevost posted a rebuke: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Before the idea of an American pope became real, Trump had played with the notion that it could be him. He declared on April 29 that his “number one choice” for the succession to Pope Francis would be himself. On May 2, less than a week after he attended Francis’s funeral, Trump posted on Truth Social (and the official White House account reposted on X) an AI-generated image of himself enthroned on a gilded chair, sporting a gold-embroidered miter, and dressed in a white papal cassock with an elaborate pectoral cross. His right hand is raised in a gesture of both blessing and command. Trump was tapping into many centuries of papal portraiture, bringing to mind Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens’s description of Diego Velázquez’s celebrated Portrait of Innocent X as “an authoritative vision of an authoritarian.” Trump called the post a “little fun,” but as in so much of Trump’s humor, the comedy of the AI image did not conceal its authoritarian intent.
These games were the shadowboxing preparatory to the real fight. Trumpism contains a deep seam of reactionary Catholicism, represented not just by Vance and Steve Bannon but by Trump’s three picks for the Supreme Court, all of whom were raised Catholic. This nexus was hostile to Francis’s version of the faith, which it regarded as weak and woke. Open opposition to Francis at the top of the Church hierarchy was led by the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who was for a time a patron of Bannon’s Dignitatis Humanae Institute. Trump’s presentation of himself as pope was wish fulfillment for those of his Catholic fans who were hoping for a Trump-friendly successor to Francis. (Trump suggested the sycophantic New York cardinal Timothy Dolan as a “very good” option.)
In this light, the choice of Prevost can be seen as somewhat analogous to the recent victories of Mark Carney in Canada and Anthony Albanese in Australia: being the un-Trump candidate is an electoral advantage. Prevost was that candidate, not merely in offering continuity with Francis but in his personality as a quiet, thoughtful, and thoroughly cosmopolitan kind of American. As Leo XIV he will stand against Trump’s demonization of immigrants, attacks on international institutions, and denial of the climate crisis; in November he told a Vatican conference that the “dominion over nature” given to humanity by God should not become “tyrannical.”
There is, however, a more awkward question for Leo and the cardinals who chose him. Can an imperial papacy really present an alternative to an imperial presidency? Or can the Church itself evolve into a kind of dominion that is not tyrannical? Francis clearly believed that it must, and there is every reason to think that Leo understands this imperative. But acting on it will not be easy.
Here an important text is a speech Francis gave to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014. He spoke of “growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful.” He was talking, ostensibly, about the European Union itself and more broadly about democratic governments. But he must have been aware that no institution had spent as many centuries aloofly laying down rules as the one he himself governed. His words were almost a definition of the traditional papacy.
Francis was implying a parallel between the way a pope ought to behave and the standards he might be setting for politicians: the Church cannot stand for humility and sensitivity if it remains institutionally arrogant and dictatorial. His successor is surely no less conscious of the contradiction between his historic calling to be a counterweight to tyrannical politics on the one side and, on the other, the structure of exclusive male hierarchy at whose pinnacle he now stands.
Hobbes was not wrong about the imperial heritage of the papacy. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, as Diarmaid MacCulloch notes in his monumental A History of Christianity (2009),
frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed. One suspects that capable and energetic men who would previously have entered imperial service, or who had indeed started out as officials in it, now entered the Church as the main career option available to them.
The tension between the Church’s origins as a community of outsiders and its evolution as the inheritor of the Roman Empire’s bureaucratic systems of command and control remains radically unresolved.
For most of its history the papacy combined the spiritual authority of religious leadership with the raw power of earthly monarchy. Until 1978 and the accession of the short-lived John Paul I, the new pope was crowned with a triple tiara whose layers symbolized his position as (in the modest formulation of the coronation ceremony) “the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the vicar of our Savior Jesus Christ on earth.” By the time this incantation was dropped, the first two of these claims had become patently absurd, but their authoritarian absolutism was—at least in principle—undiminished.
The papacy finally lost its position as a temporal monarchy when the armed forces of a resurgent and unified Italy entered Rome in September 1870. But Pius IX anticipated this loss by doubling down on spiritual imperialism. He decreed “the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience” to the “power of the Roman pontiff.” He assumed for the papacy “that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.” These doctrines, once declared, were “irreformable.”
The pope thus became a new kind of emperor, one who rules not over space but over time. Armed with these special powers of infallibility and immutability, he could defy history and social change. Until 1967 “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” had to swear the “Oath Against Modernism” decreed by Pius X in 1910:
I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another.
This language—hierarchy, subordination, obedience, immutability—made the Church a natural ally of authoritarian regimes, especially in the forms they took in Catholic countries. The Vatican made a comfortable deal with Benito Mussolini in the Lateran Pacts of 1929. The Church declared Francisco Franco’s coup against the Spanish Republic a “national crusade” and subsequently helped to prop up his dictatorship. The Church also rallied around Marshal Pétain in Vichy France and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Many Catholics (individually and collectively) acted heroically to resist fascism and oppose its atrocities, but they had to go against the grain of the institutional Church’s doctrine of submission to one-man rule. The spiritual dictatorship of the pope provided a model for its temporal equivalents—which is why, with the resurgence of fascism worldwide, the conduct of the pope has a resonance far beyond the bounds of his own church.
In principle the imperial Church was dismantled by the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962. It reimagined authority in the way the secular revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had—as derived from the people. Its great innovation was the redefinition of the Church as the “People of God,” an effective declaration of popular spiritual sovereignty. The 1965 encyclical “Gaudium et Spes” (the title an almost rapturous evocation of Joy and Hope) declared:
The People of God believes that it is led by the Lord’s Spirit, Who fills the earth. Motivated by this faith, it labors to decipher authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose in the happenings, needs and desires in which this People has a part along with other men of our age.
The radicalism of this formulation is twofold. First, there is that simple word “led.” Leadership is implicitly democratized—it is rooted not in the “power of the Roman pontiff” but in the workings of a universal Spirit. And even more profoundly, the meaning of the divine is not clear, absolute, timeless, or uniquely unveiled to the pope. It is a set of mysterious signs that the people must work collectively to decipher. They seek those clues not only in Church doctrine but in their own bodies and minds and in the events unfolding in a history they share with fellow humans of all faiths and none.
This vision, however, was not shared by all participants in Vatican II. Wojtyła, who was elevated to archbishop of Kraków during this time, voted against the final version of the encyclical. One of the leading German theologians at the council, Professor Joseph Ratzinger, expressed (as MacCulloch records) his “private disapproval of what he saw as the facile sunniness of Gaudium et Spes.” In 1978 Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II. After his death in 2005 he was succeeded by Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI. Between them these two counterrevolutionary popes ruled the Church for thirty-five years before Francis’s accession. They reimposed the authoritarian style.
John Paul’s superstar magnetism restored the luster of papal supremacy, and the much duller Benedict was still able to bask in his reflected glory. But their papacies were darkened by an ever-deepening shadow. Absolutism is absolutely corrupt. A culture of submission, obedience, and hierarchy breeds abuse, cover-ups, and impunity. The Vatican protected clergymen who abused children and young people. It operated a worldwide system in which victims were silenced and perpetrators were shielded from criminal sanctions, often moved from parish to parish, or even country to country, to evade the law.
The unraveling of this impunity has had catastrophic consequences for the institutional Church, not least in my own country. I grew up in an Ireland that was characterized not only by its overwhelming Catholic majority but by the ubiquitous visibility of, and deep respect for, its clergy. Yet in 2014 the American Catholic writer Donald Cozzens, addressing his fellow priests who had gathered at Ireland’s once mighty seminary in Maynooth to celebrate the jubilee of their ordinations, was brutally frank:
The respect and trust of past years has been mostly shattered. Good people look at us with a wary eye. We want to say, “You can trust me. I won’t hurt you nor will I hurt your children.” But trust has been broken.
He posed an existential question: “Could you men gathered here at the seminary that formed you possibly be the last priests in Ireland?” The suggestion was not ridiculous: last November the Dublin Catholic archdiocese acknowledged, “No priest was ordained for the archdiocese this year and only two priests have been ordained for the archdiocese since 2020.”
This loss of trust has accelerated the loss of papal power, especially in Europe and North America. Arguably popes now have no more than a marginal influence on the opinions and behavior of the faithful. The patriarchal Church has not been able to prevent Catholic women from claiming their personal and bodily autonomy. Most sexually active Catholics use contraceptives, even though banning them became one of the Church’s signature teachings after the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” was issued in 1968. Most support the use of in vitro fertilization, which is also banned. In the US only about 10 percent of Catholics agree with the Church’s insistence that abortion should be illegal in all cases. In Western Europe and the US, a majority of Catholics support the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples. American Catholics do tend to be less likely to divorce than Protestants, but they also believe that divorced people should be admitted to the sacraments. Conversely, right-wing Catholics feel free to ignore papal teaching on the climate crisis, poverty, and migration. Essentially, in societies where they are free to make choices on these matters, many Catholics like it when the pope agrees with them but are not too bothered if he doesn’t.
What matters most in democracies, therefore, is not the pope’s teaching. It is his mode of leadership. Shorn of its temporal power and its ability to command obedience, the papacy is a display of manners. The pope acts out an idea of what good authority looks like. This is what Francis was presumably chosen to do by his fellow cardinals in 2013. His papacy was revolutionary, not in its content but in its conduct—and the assumption is that Leo has been picked to consolidate that revolution.
Following Francis does not, then, imply an open embrace of doctrinal or organizational reform. Conceptually, Francis returned to the idea of the People of God that was proclaimed in 1965 and then effectively annulled by John Paul and Benedict. But he did little to change conservative doctrine on reproductive rights, divorce, or homosexuality. He made limited progress toward ending the overwhelming dominance of a male and (in principle at least) celibate clergy. He did appoint several women to senior positions in the Roman Curia, though the conclave that followed his death displayed the reality that 133 largely elderly men were still in control of the Church.
The final report of the Synod on Synodality—a worldwide process of consultation with the faithful—was issued last October, and it forms both the last will and testament of Francis’s papacy and the agreed agenda for Leo’s. It acknowledges those who “continued to express the pain of feeling excluded or judged because of their marital status, identity or sexuality” and recognizes that “a desire emerged to expand possibilities for participation and for the exercise of differentiated co-responsibility by all the Baptised, men and women.” But short of allowing women to become priests, the most obvious way to shift the gender balance within the Church would be to revive the ancient Christian practice, which persisted through the Church’s first millennium, of allowing women to be ordained as deacons. The report leaves this demand hanging in the air: “The question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.” The evidence suggests that Prevost has little enthusiasm for the idea. In October 2023 he said that “‘clericalizing women’ doesn’t necessarily solve a problem, it might make a new problem.”
Francis’s transformation of the papacy, therefore, was one of style rather than substance. This is not to diminish its importance—with strongman rulers on the rise, the adoption by a pope of a democratic style of leadership counts. His biographer Austen Ivereigh noted the importance of one of Francis’s first acts as pope—his choice of residence: “Francis went to live not in the Apostolic Palace, but in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse because he didn’t think of himself as Rome’s emperor, but [as] the Church’s pastor-in-chief.”
In this comedy of manners, the importance of style could be quite literal. Francis kept his old black shoes, in contrast to his predecessor Benedict’s handcrafted red ones. He sported a cheap silver-plated pectoral cross and plastic watch and dressed in a plain white cassock. By way of flagrant contrast, his would-be nemesis Cardinal Burke epitomized what Francis mockingly called the “peacock priest.” Burke, as described by Frédéric Martel in his best-selling In the Closet of the Vatican (2019), brings to mind the satiric ecclesiastical fashion show in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972):
He can stroll about in full sail, in his cappa magna, in an unthinkably long robe, in a forest of white lace or dressed in a long coat shaped like a dressing gown, while at the same time, in the course of an interview, denouncing in the name of tradition a “Church that has become too feminized.”
Francis understood the importance of these signifiers to the opponents of change. “They criticize me,” he said in 2017, “first, because I don’t speak like a pope, and second, because I don’t act like a king.” By declining to act the emperor, he took the enormous risk of demystifying an office that after all rests on its claim of unique personal access to the divine mystery. In a famous passage on the British royal family, the Victorian writer Walter Bagehot warned, “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced…. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Francis let in the daylight upon the magic of the papacy, and it seems clear that Leo has no intention of closing those curtains again.
For many Catholics this deflation of the papal persona has been a joy. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who was a fervent Catholic in her youth in Nigeria, wrote an essay for The Atlantic capturing the way Francis allowed those who had been alienated by the Church’s arrogance to reconnect with it. She noted that as a young woman she had “recoiled at how quick the Church was to ostracize and humiliate, how the threat of punishment always hovered, like a hard fist, ready to strike.” But she also warmed to Francis, a pope who
seems to value the person as much as the institution. He seems to acknowledge that human beings are flawed. He seems able to say that most un-Catholic of things: “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” suggests flexibility, room for knowing and growing and changing.
Not long after his election, in an impromptu press conference on a plane from Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis asked a startling rhetorical question: “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Those last five words must surely rank among the least imperious ever spoken by a pope. Francis also did another remarkably unpapal thing: he admitted that he was wrong. His clumsy and defensive handling of a clerical sexual abuse scandal in Chile was rightly condemned, yet he confessed his own sins not to God (though he presumably did that as well) but to the victims. In meeting each of them individually, he admitted, “I was part of the problem! I caused this. I am very sorry, and I ask your forgiveness.”
Is there any way back from a pope who tries not to judge and who acknowledges that he has been part of the problem? The election of Prevost suggests that the Church hierarchy knows that there is not. The new pope’s manner may not be as emphatically unpretentious as Francis’s, but he is surely not seeking a return to the imperial style. In his first speech from the balcony of St. Peter’s he declared, “I am a son of Saint Augustine, an Augustinian. He said, ‘With you I am a Christian, for you a bishop.’” The message was clear: he is first and foremost a fellow member of the People of God, and in his office his duty is to serve rather than to command. In a more subtle signifier, Leo said his first Mass in the Sistine Chapel wearing black shoes like Francis, not the red ones that adorned the feet of the imperial popes. He is not going to be a peacock priest.
He may, more seriously, find himself asking the victims of clerical sexual abuse for forgiveness, just as Francis did. The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests alleges that as the bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, “Prevost failed to open an investigation [and] sent inadequate information to Rome” regarding allegations of misconduct by two priests in his diocese. Those allegations will acquire much greater prominence now that the bishop is the pope. He may have to repeat Francis’s acts of personal contrition. Humility, in that case, must not be merely preached but painfully practiced. And it must be institutionalized: the ultimate apology to the victims of clerical abuse would be the creation of a Church in which it would be impossible for perpetrators to enjoy impunity—which is to say, a Church in which priesthood is no longer a function of patriarchal power.
Leo will find that walking in Francis’s shoes is one thing, but knowing the destination of the journey is quite another. Francis raised the difficult question—not just for the Church but for the world—of how to act authoritatively in a contemporary culture where good authority is assailed by blowhard despotism on the one side and on the other by the fragmentation of the media that used to project it. Alongside his religious faith, Francis placed his faith in the possibility of a form of leadership that is stripped of power, magic, and enforced obedience and that relies instead on the expression of shared respect and mutual love. But he was unable—and perhaps unwilling—to give that faith an adequate institutional form, one that truly recognizes the equality of the female half of humanity and that does not in reality continue to judge LGBTQ+ people harshly.
Leo will be a good pope if he succeeds, in his own quieter and more cerebral way, in sustaining the decency, compassion, and openness of his predecessor. He will be a great one if he manages to translate that benign comportment into the kind of change that does not ultimately depend on the personality of a pope. Such change is structural and permanent: the complete transformation of a monarchical male dictatorship into a living embodiment of the spirit of democracy. Only when that is accomplished will the ghost of empire have been laid to rest at last.
English (US) · 