The world’s 1.4 billion Catholics have a new pope, and for the first time, he is from America.Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief of The New York Times, introduces us to Pope Leo XIV.Guest: Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief of The New York TimesBackground reading: Who is Pope Leo XIV?The first American pope took a global route to the role.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who is the new American Pope?
Hi, this is Jason Horowitz, the Rome Bureau Chief of the New York Times, and I'm here in St. Peter's Square. looking up at the roof of the Sistine Chapel where cardinals are inside voting on who the next pope should be.
Like everybody else, I'm looking at a chimney surrounded by seagulls and trying to figure out if anything's coming out of it, and if it's smoke, if it's black smoke, they have an inconclusive vote, or if it is white smoke, which means we have a pope.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of the white smoke at the Vatican?
So there's white smoke in the square, and I'm running back to file the story. But once again, white smoke, a new pope.
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Today. The world's 1.4 billion Catholics now have a new pope. And for the first time, he's from America. It's Friday, May 9th. Jason, good evening. Good evening, Michael. As they say in Italy, habemus pabulum. Do I have that right?
Yeah, we don't say it all the time, just when we get a pope.
And it happened pretty quickly.
Yeah, it happened really quickly. It was the second day. A lot of people thought we were going to be in a long conclave. It seemed like they had a lot of new cardinals who needed to get to know each other and wasn't very clear how long they would be in there.
The idea was that if it was as quick as it was, as it's been actually pretty often going back to the 1930s, it would be someone who was a frontrunner, someone we had been hearing a lot about. And that's not exactly how it shook out.
Well, Jason, when you and I last spoke, the evening that Pope Francis had died, you laid out for us quite clearly the stakes around the question of who would succeed Francis. Would it be a pope in the mold of Francis who embodied his desire for inclusion over rules and religious purity?
Or might it be a pope who represented, as you put it, these powerful conservative forces and traditional instincts that were so frequently at odds with Francis? Did it feel like that was the guiding principle over this process? Yeah.
Yeah, I think that that dynamic was at play in the conclave. But I also think that there was something else going on. I think that the cardinals saw all these people come to Francis's funeral. I think that they realized that they had had a pope who for 12 years really put the Catholic Church on the world stage. I think that they started thinking, do we really want... a bureaucrat?
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Chapter 3: How does the papal election process work?
Do we really want someone who might suck the air out of this? And don't we really want, and this was what was most important to Francis, maybe a pastor, the pastor to guide the church and whether it be a priest in the parish, a bishop in a city, or as it turns out, maybe a Pope in Rome.
Well, with that principle and influence seemingly guiding the process, it sounds like, Francis, a bit from the grave, hanging over all this, tell us about the mechanics of this election process, the unique rules around it, and what we understand happened behind closed doors. Well,
Well, full disclosure, we sort of know nothing because in a way it's the I like to think of it as sort of the most beautifully frescoed black box in the world. The Sistine Chapel, when the cardinals go in there to elect the pope, we don't know what the dynamics really are. We don't know what the votes are.
We know the process as prescribed.
Yeah, so the cardinals basically go into the Sistine Chapel and they take an oath of absolute secrecy. And at a certain point, the doors close after one of the prelates says, Ex Domnus, everybody out. And everyone who's not a voting cardinal, you know, whether it be members of the choir or bishops, everybody starts filing out and the doors close.
And how many cardinals are voting and how many votes are needed?
So as 133 voting cardinals entered into the Sistine Chapel, there were two guys who didn't make it in because they weren't feeling well.
and of those 133 you need 89 votes you need two-thirds to become pope so that seems simple enough but two-thirds a majority in a college that represents the entire world where not everyone is speaking italian which is supposed to be the working language of the church which probably slowed things down the first night Anyway, it's very difficult to hit that threshold.
And on the first day, which was Wednesday, they have one vote. And we kind of expected that it would be inconclusive. And in fact, it was. And the way that the church shows that is that black smoke starts billowing out of a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel. But when they leave the Sistine Chapel, they're still sequestered. They still have a vow of secrecy, but they aren't taking an oath of silence.
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Chapter 4: Why was an American Pope considered a non-starter?
And he spends a lot of time out in Peru and he really becomes committed to the country and to the Catholics there that he ends up taking Peruvian citizenship And it really becomes core to his identity. In many ways, you know, yes, he has dual citizenship, the United States and Peru, but also he sort of projects himself as Peruvian in a way.
He's very much, you know, sees himself as part of South America as much as North America.
Another way, perhaps, in which he is very much like Pope Francis. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that that's right. Pope Francis really was shaped by his experience in Argentina. And the brand of Catholicism there was something that I think that Francis saw himself a little bit, perhaps, in Prevost. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, he brought him to Rome.
Well, just describe that. Francis bringing Prevost to Rome. That seems like a pretty important moment.
So Michael, do you remember when we talked last time and I mentioned that Francis really believed, like many in the Vatican, that personnel was policy? I do. I think that what he really needed to do was to bring people in who saw the world the way he saw the world. And that's where Prevost came in.
Being in leadership in the church is another formative experience.
In 2015, he appointed him bishop. in Peru, but he also ends up bringing them back to Rome. And in 2023, he ends up heading up the Office for Bishops, which is this major job inside the Vatican, which is in charge of all the bishops all across the world.
He called me, and specifically because he didn't want someone from the Roman Curia to take on this role. He wanted a missionary. He wanted someone from outside. He wanted someone who would come in with a different perspective.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of having an American Pope?
Yeah, he entrusts him with not just the bureaucracy, but the pastors all around the world, right? The people who are actually going to be, you know, running dioceses, the people who are going to be, you know, picking which priests are in parishes. Basically, what he's doing is he's helping Francis seed the future of the Roman Catholic Church with bishops. And that's a major thing.
And his star keeps rising. And in 2023, he was made a cardinal. So if you think about that, even two years ago, you know, Prevost would not have even been allowed in the Sistine Chapel to pick the next pope. And now, you know, he's not just in there, he becomes the next pope.
So clearly Francis played a big role in his rise. How much do his views genuinely overlap with those of Francis? You said a few moments ago that we don't really know his views on social issues the way we do know the views of Francis. But reading the tea leaves and his record, what do we know?
So I think what's clear is that Pope Leo has many similar views to Francis, especially on issues that really matter right now, like, for example, migration. I think that it's pretty clear that Pope Leo is going to be a champion of migrants in much the same way that Francis was. On social issues, I think he's pretty much in the Catholic mainstream, which is pretty much don't touch doctrine, right?
That there's Catholic teaching and that's not going to be changed and it's not to be touched. In 2012, he made it pretty clear that he was not going to be somebody who was going to, for example, change church teaching on homosexuality. He referred to it as the, quote, homosexual lifestyle and not in a positive way.
So I think that what we can expect from him along those lines is someone who stands up for, you know, opposition to gay marriage and birth control, the sort of usual things that, you know, Catholic conservative would do. But then again, you know, when Pope Francis was a cardinal in Buenos Aires, he was also considered, you know, your classic conservative. And he changed when he became pope.
And so we really don't know what Pope Leo is going to be like. Just because Cardinal Prevost held certain views, a lot of things can just change.
To end this conversation, Jason, I want to return to the subject of Pope Leo as being from America. And as you've made clear, he spends so much of his career outside of it. But What we know about Pope Francis is that he had such a rough time with the American Catholic Church. You made that so clear last time we spoke. He was endlessly frustrated with the conservative elements of the church.
They tangled with them constantly. He ended up pushing a lot of them out of the church. They thought that he was going to ruin the church with some of his progressive viewpoints. If we believe that Pope Leo is in the mold of Pope Francis, do we think he's going to have those same battles with the conservative elements of the Catholic Church in the U.S.?
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