A Pope Who Is Conservative on Doctrine and Progressive on Social Issues

Predicting how a newly appointed pope will shape the Catholic Church is almost as difficult as predicting whom the conclave of cardinals will select as the next pontiff. Just as Robert Francis Prevost (now Pope Leo XIV) surprised many prognosticators by becoming pope in the first place – when he wasn’t expected to be the favored candidate – so he might well again surprise observers by what he actually does now that he is in the papal chair.

Popes in the past have certainly defied expectations at times. After all, no one anticipated that Pope John XXIII would convene the most influential ecumenical council of the previous five hundred years or become perhaps the most progressive pope of the 20^th century.

And if the pope’s actions are hard to predict, the global changes that might shape a papal term are even more uncertain. It was hard, for instance, for anyone in 1978 to imagine the events that would shape John Paul II’s papacy – the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, and the beginning of the Church’s global sex abuse crisis.

So, Pope Leo XIV might turn out to be a very different shepherd of the Church than anything we might imagine, and he might face challenges and opportunities that are beyond what we can presently envision. But if the full details of his papacy are impossible to predict, it is probably not too early to guess what the cardinals might have expected when they chose him, based on what we know of his record.

A Pope Who Is Conservative on Doctrine and Progressive on Social Issues

The preliminary news reports about the new pope indicate that he has a reputation for being “progressive on many social issues, but conservative on church doctrine.” When I saw those reports, I was reminded of the description of Archbishop John Quinn, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops from 1977-1980, when Prevost was a young seminarian preparing for the priesthood. Quinn was “very conservative when it comes to doctrine” but “progressive on social issues,” the New York Times reported in 1977, in words that presaged almost verbatim some of the descriptions given yesterday of Prevost’s ideological leanings.

This description was not unique to Quinn; it was true of most Catholic bishops in the late 1970s and 1980s. One of those bishops was the archbishop of Prevost’s native Chicago in the 1980s, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who during the first year of Prevost’s priesthood led the nation’s bishops to endorse a consistent life ethic that combined opposition to abortion with opposition to nuclear arms buildup and capital punishment.

Prevost seems to be cut from that same mold. He cares deeply about the human dignity of immigrants and the poor. Earlier this year, he took J. D. Vance to task on social media.

At the same time, he has made conservative statements about sexuality and gender. None of this would have been surprising in the 1980s, when people assumed as a matter of course that American bishops could (and usually were) advocates of nonviolence and expanded government social welfare programs, and at the same time were critical of gay rights and abortion. Even Pope John Paul II, though widely considered a conservative (as indeed he was on issues of marriage and sexuality), echoed the criticisms of unregulated capitalism that had been part of the Catholic Church’s social teaching throughout the twentieth century.

By choosing the name Leo, the new pope has presumably signaled his intention to make the Church’s social teaching central to his papacy, since it was the last pope named Leo (Leo XIII) who issued one of the Church’s most famous social justice encyclicals: Rerum Novarum (1891). That encyclical, which was a pronouncement on the human dignity of workers and the social obligations of capitalists and governments, became the foundation for more than a century of Catholic social teaching. It was because of Leo XIII’s teaching that the American Catholic Church became a strong advocate for the living wage and labor rights.

But at the same time, as conservatives in the Church have correctly pointed out, Leo XIII also believed in offering a robust intellectual defense against secularism through natural law and systematic theology. It was Leo XIII who promoted a revival of Thomistic thinking in the Church and who laid the groundwork for the flowering of Catholic apologetics and the harmony of faith and reason in the 20^th-century Church. In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), he wrote, “The duty of religiously defending the truths divinely delivered, and of resisting those who dare oppose them, pertains to philosophic pursuits. Wherefore, it is the glory of philosophy to be esteemed as the bulwark of faith and the strong defense of religion.”

So, if the name Leo signals a strong commitment to the Church’s social teaching and concern for the poor, it equally signals a commitment to a robust, natural law-centered Catholic apologetic in the face of secular philosophies. Or, to put it in contemporary terms, it may mean defending the Church’s teaching on marriage, gender, sexuality, abortion, and eternal truths along with lifting up the rights of immigrants, the poor, and the marginalized.

If that turns out to be the new Pope Leo XIV’s agenda, it will closely echo the longstanding priorities of the Church, and it may be exactly what both progressives and traditionalists in the Church need right now – even though neither group may be comfortable with it.

It will certainly be a sign that the Church’s teaching is not an echo of either Democratic or Republican views. Though the new pope is an American, the teaching that he has championed during his decades in ministry is at odds with prevailing political trends in America. While deeply concerned with the poor, it challenges progressives on marriage, gender, sexuality, and abortion.

And for many traditionalist Catholics in the United States, a pope who shares their views on sexuality but opposes President Trump and Vice President Vance on immigration policy may also be an uncomfortable challenge to their politics. If he really champions the Church’s traditional teaching on issues of gender and sexuality, they won’t be able to dismiss his views as easily as they did those of Pope Francis – which means that when he takes Trump-supporting Republicans to task for their treatment of immigrants and the marginalized, they may have to pay attention.

A pope who demonstrates that the Church can rise above contemporary ideological divides and offer unchanging truths that lift up the poor while recognizing a divine order for society that doesn’t fit current assumptions may in the end enhance the Church’s credibility, both in the United States and elsewhere. At least, that might have been what the cardinals were thinking when they broke with expectations and took a risk in electing the first American to be pope.

(Photo: Robert Prevost / Photo by Frayjhonattan / Wikimedia Commons)