Reportaje The Washington Post, 08.05.2025 Anumita Kaur y Tobi Raji, reporteras
Pope Leo XIV spent two decades working in Peru’s poorest enclave and appears to be in the mold of Pope Francis — who carried a legacy as “the people’s pope” for his outreach to those on society’s margins.
The Chicago-born pontiff is the first from the United States to lead the Catholic Church, and while his positions on some of the church’s hot-button issues remain unclear, he has signaled continuity with his predecessor, who challenged norms, embraced migrants and the poor, and sought to build an inclusive church.
“The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom, but rather called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them, and to look for ways that he can better live the Gospel message in the midst of his people,” then-Cardinal Robert Prevost said in an interview in October.Here is what we know so far about Leo XIV’s political and social views.
His views on women in the church appear aligned with Francis
During his papacy, Francis opened more leadership roles to women than did any previous pontiff and established commissions to study the possibility of women becoming deacons.
Francis also turned to Prevost, tasking him with overseeing a revolutionary change that added three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations go forward to the pope. But Francis maintained clear limits, repeatedly affirming the church’s teaching that bars the ordination of women as priests.
Leo has backed similar limits about women’s governance in the Catholic Church. During a 2023 Vatican news conference, he said that “women can add a great deal to the life of the church on many different levels,” acknowledging the “slow process” of expanding women’s roles within the church and the Holy See. Yet he rejected the idea that ordaining women would necessarily address concerns about representation or equality. “‘Clericalizing women’ doesn’t necessarily solve a problem,” he told reporters, the National Catholic Register reported at the time. “It might make a new problem.”
He was a member of his university’s antiabortion club
Leo was a member of the group Villanovans for Life while he attended Villanova University near Philadelphia, according to club president Eileen Sceski. (Leo received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the university in 1977.) He was among the original members of the club, alongside co-founders Margaret Mary Filoromo and Robert Dodaro, Sceski said, adding that Villanovans for Life is the oldest college antiabortion club in the nation.
The Catholic Church has long opposed abortion, and Pope Francis called it a “grave sin” and equated the procedure to “murder,” even as he expressed empathy for women who have had abortions, calling theirs an “agonizing and painful decision.” In 2015, he opened a temporary “mercy” window for women to confess and realign with the church.
Leo has championed action to address the climate crisis
As a cardinal, Prevost once urged that society move “from words to action” to address the climate crisis. “Dominion over nature” should not become “tyrannical,” he said according to Vatican News, and instead must be a “relationship of reciprocity” with the environment.
Francis was devoted to addressing the climate crisis: He wrote extensively about climate change, hosted environmental summits and met with climate activists, policymakers and even oil executives.
He has said Western mass media promotes ‘anti-Christian lifestyle choices’
In a 2012 address to bishops, Leo said Western mass media and popular culture promoted “enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.”
“The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully ingrained in the viewing public, that when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective,” he said.
He urged pastors, preachers, teachers and catechists “to become far more informed about the challenge of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media.”
His views on LGBTQ+ issues may diverge from Francis’s
Francis made strides with LGBTQ+ outreach, once stating: “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge?”
Leo in 2012 told bishops that media depictions of the modern family present a major challenge to the Catholic Church.
“Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema,” he said at the time, according to the Arlington Catholic Herald.
Leo opposed teaching gender and sexuality in Peruvian schools, according to local news media
Jesus Leon Angeles, a coordinator of a Peruvian Catholic group who has known Prevost since 2018, said the new pope has shown special concern for Venezuelan migrants in Peru, Reuters reported. “He is a person who likes to help,” Leon Angeles said.
Francis routinely expressed compassion for migrants, advocating for their rights throughout his papacy. He washed the feet of Arab migrants seeking asylum in Europe, implored U.S. leaders to embrace immigrants, and in January he called the Trump administration’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants a “disgrace.”
