Leo XIV: A papacy anchored in Israel’s embrace?

The surprise election of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as Pope – taking the name Leo XIV – has triggered a rare moment of clarity in Vatican politics, breaking the mold of business as usual. A quiet Midwesterner with a crisp Chicago accent, a math degree from Villanova University, as well as decades of missionary and administrative service under his belt, Prevost is not some flamboyant Jesuit media darling. He is, instead, a meticulous operator whose loyalty to the clerical order and instinct for institutional repair hint at a conservative pragmatism wrapped in pastoral softness. It is the kind of development that both CNN and Columbia University will misread, one by dismissing him as “low profile,” the other by projecting onto him another liberal internationalist. He is neither. And that is precisely the point.

A Man From Chicago, Formed in Peru

Prevost’s background has the elements of a Jesuit travelogue without the vanity. Born in Chicago in 1955, he entered the Order of St. Augustine, studied theology in Rome, and spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in Peru. He worked as a missionary, then a bishop, during one of Latin America’s more turbulent phases, rebuilding parishes, rooting out clerical rot, and fending off the ideological detritus of liberation theology. He returned to Rome with a reputation for competence rather than charisma.

Under Pope Francis, however, Prevost rose quickly. As prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, he helped shape the episcopacy of the global South with the care of a man who doesn’t trust ideological blueprints. He was part of the Vatican’s operational core, not its publicity wing. That is exactly why his election surprised the chattering class. They weren’t paying attention.

Doctrine Without Apology

Prevost is not a revolutionary. He belongs to that rare breed of prelates who take orthodoxy as a starting point, not a problem to be managed. His theological writings suggest a thinker comfortable with Thomas Aquinas but emotionally tuned to Augustine: pessimistic about human nature, deeply sacramental, and cautious about the promises of modernity. He’s not interested in revising moral theology to flatter the age. He believes, astonishingly enough, that the Church exists to save souls.

He supports mercy, but not as an alibi. He tolerates pastoral flexibility, but not doctrinal drift. During the Amazon Synod, he remained skeptical of proposals to ordain married men. He has also quietly resisted German efforts to bless same-sex unions and redefine sin along cultural lines. He is not out to excommunicate the confused, but neither will he baptize confusion.

Political Without Partisan Delusion

The political instincts of Leo XIV defy the taxonomy beloved by pundits. He is not a banner-waving conservative, but neither is he a proxy for the Soros-funded clerical avant-garde. His experience in Latin America made him wary of both economic oligarchy and class warfare slogans. He has spoken of inequality as a moral concern, not a campaign slogan. He supported Francis’s environmentalism only insofar as it remained moral, not technocratic.

Prevost sees the modern state as both necessary and dangerous—a position closer to Hobbes than Rousseau. He believes in order. He respects subsidiarity. He doubts that bureaucracies can save us. In today’s Rome, this qualifies as heresy.

Trump: Enemy, Ally, or Interlocutor?

He has never commented on President Donald Trump directly, and he likely never will. But his Vatican record is revealing. When some U.S. bishops tried to aggressively discipline pro-Trump clergy or push blanket condemnations of “Christian nationalism,” Prevost counseled caution. Not because he supports the former president, but because he understands what Trumpism represents: a political insurgency born of cultural dislocation.

In a Church hemorrhaging the working class, Prevost knows better than to treat populists as lepers. He doesn’t moralize about MAGA hats. He listens. In an ecclesial environment increasingly dominated by NGO-speak and bourgeois sensitivities, that makes him both countercultural and, paradoxically, pastoral.

Zionism and the Jews: A Return to Dialogue

If Francis’s Vatican flirted with fashionable anti-Zionism—hosting Mahmoud Abbas, parroting UN talking points—Leo XIV is a corrective. Prevost has visited Israel repeatedly. He has expressed admiration for the resilience of Jewish life and has cultivated ties with Jewish leaders in Peru, the United States, and Europe. He does not sentimentalize the Palestinian cause, nor reduce the Middle East to a victim-oppressor binary.

According to sources in Rome, Prevost views Israel as “a moral project within history”—a phrase that startled the Latin desk at the Secretariat of State. He has called Netanyahu “a necessary man in dangerous times,” which, in Vaticanese, borders on radical candor. There will be no warm embraces for Hamas delegates under this papacy.

On May 12, three days after his election, Pope Leo XIV has chosen to reaffirm his commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations as his first official act. In a letter to major Jewish organizations, he pledged to continue and deepen the Church’s dialogue with the Jewish people, invoking the spirit and principles of Nostra Aetate, the landmark declaration of the Second Vatican Council, which repudiated antisemitism, rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus, and called for mutual respect and understanding between Catholics and Jews.

Naming Himself Leo: Not Just Optics

Pope Leo XIV is a name loaded with historical weight. Leo XIII was the pope of Rerum Novarum, a relevant historical figure who steered the Church into the industrial era without capitulating to socialism. Leo I—“the Great”—confronted Attila the Hun, defined Christological orthodoxy, and asserted the primacy of Rome in the face of imperial collapse.

Prevost’s choice signals continuity with both: a concern for social justice without surrendering to ideology, and a readiness to confront the barbarism of the present age without apology. It is not the name of a caretaker pope. It is the name of someone who intends to lead.

Augustine in the Time of Decline

St. Augustine’s influence on Prevost is not merely devotional. It is constitutional. Like Augustine, Prevost sees man as fallen, society as contingent, and salvation as outside history. He does not believe we are marching toward a humanist utopia. He does not view progress as linear. He believes the Church must navigate history without worshipping it.

This Augustinian realism—so at odds with the optimism of post-Conciliar politics—may be the defining feature of his papacy. While Francis embraced Fratelli Tutti as a blueprint for global fraternity, Leo XIV may lean instead into Civitas Dei: the reminder that the City of God and the City of Man are distinct, often adversarial, and never to be confused.

A Papacy of Conversation, Not Collision

Was Prevost chosen to confront the rising right? To domesticate Trump? No. That would require a different man and a different Church. Leo XIV was chosen not to clash with the West but to reintroduce Rome to it. He represents neither anti-Americanism nor Eurocratic liberalism. He is a Midwestern Catholic who understands that the postwar order is unravelling and that the Church cannot stake its future on NGOs, Soros panels, or permanent diplomacy.

He may be the only man on earth capable of holding a serious conversation with Trump and also with Viktor Orbán, with Netanyahu and with Macron and capable of reminding each that no throne endures forever.

The College of Cardinals did not elect a media darling or a placeholder. It elected a man who understands power, understands decline, and does not confuse the two. Leo XIV does not preach the end of history, nor does he curate moods for dying empires. He speaks for a Church that remembers what it is. Against the backdrop of soft authoritarianism, moral drift, and elite frivolity, Rome has chosen sobriety. The Holy Ghost may not have fully delivered yet, but at least it’s a beginning; for a Church that measures change in millennia, even a token course-correction is enough to keep up the illusion of motion.

(Amy K. Rosenthal contributed to this blog)