The author leaves out two potentially promising points: 1) The last time Robert Prevost registered to vote, it was as a Republican. 2) He has a degree in mathematics. That may mean that he is smart enough to understand that socialism is unsustainable.
May 8, 2025
The new Pope Leo XIV gives us reasons to hope
by Monica Showalter
AmericanThinker.com
Habemus Papam. We have a pope.
Thus the words rang out to St. Peter's Square as huge crowds, waving the flags of their nations, and many more of us watched live on television.
I was right on one thing: That the new pope wouldn't be anyone most of us had ever heard of. Cardinal Robert Prevost, a U.S. citizen who took out Peruvian citizenship after a long mission in that country, has a Wikipedia page devoid of much useful content.
Still, there are reasons to be hopeful.
The former cardinal, who is from Chicago, is of Spanish, French and Italian descent, which explains his Mediterranean look. He came out in red papal robes, all ornate and embroidered, same as previous popes before Pope Francis, meaning, he's more traditional than Pope Francis, whose desire to appear humble verged on ostentatious, although it wasn't malevolent.
That was him, this is Leo. It suggests he won't be the same as his predecessor.
And the name he picked was reason to be hopeful, too: Leo. The last pope named Leo, Leo XIII (1878-1903) was famous for denouncing socialism. That tells me all I need to hear, but for many, it will be well worth looking at for the nuances -- Leo XIII was also a champion of labor and unions, which, given the realities of the times, seemed like a good idea. As for the socialism, his condemnation of its failures is eternal, and he's the only pope who ever singled out socialism for its evils very specifically by name.
The other thing is that Leo XIII was a mystic. He had a vision of a Church under fire from the devil, and wrote a once-famous prayer calling on St. Michael the Archangel to defend it. For awhile, every parish read it at the end of Mass. With modernity, they don't, but maybe they will start it up again. And what a coincidence, today is the Feast of the Apparition of St. Michael, reportedly saving the people of Monte Gargano, Italy, from invading evil. It makes me wonder if this is why he chose the name of Leo.
His background might give some pause -- I don't know the full story about his citizenship and whether he chose to dump his U.S. citizenship or kept it, or really needed Peruvian citizenship to get around, or simply wanted to be like the Peruvians he ministered to. It isn't that important to a cleric, who is Heaven-focused, so I don't judge. I don't feel optimistic that he was from Chicago, home of Cardinal Cupich who hid his pectoral cross as he gave his blessing to the DNC with its abortion truck outside, and to FARC's sympathizers in the states, but his Mediterranean background suggests he didn't come from the elites.
As for Peru, well, it's kind of the intellectual heart of Latin America, with lots of good and bad, which will keep us guessing. It's the home nation of liberation theology, the place where that godawful idea was invented and then acted out in the monstrous terror war of the Shining Path guerrillas. But it's also the home of two of the greatest intellectual powerhouses the region has ever produced -- anti-tyranny literary lion Mario Vargas Llosa, who died recently, and economics apostle of property-rights, Hernando de Soto.
It's useful to know that he was sent to Chiclayo, Peru, the country's fourth-largest city, about 475 miles north of Lima. That sounds bad, but it's more likely than not to have been good. If he were in Chiclayo, listening to the Peruvian parishioners, many of whom would have been Native Americans, he probably would have heard a lot of Trump-like voter things from them, condemning the elites who oppress them, same as we know here. He definitely would have heard them blast the Shining Path and all its evil works -- I've been to Peru, I know that's what they would tell him, no guerrilla romance in those quarters, none. If he had been stationed in a bigger city, usually the nation's capital, and been associated with one of the universities, or collected a lot of degrees from them, then he'd probably be a liberation theology type, a woke leftist as crazy as the ones seen in universities here. But he wasn't.
I've been to many smaller cities in Latin America and ... they are wonderful. I like to think he will have been influenced by them.
All the same, he will probably be middle-of-the-road -- he would need to be, to collect the votes of leftist cardinals, as a pope is elected by a two-thirds majority. It probably was a plus to them that he took Peruvian citizenship. Yet he will probably be pro-illegal immigration to the U.S., Pope Francis would not have promoted him to cardinal in 2023 if he were not on that page. That could open the door to some incoherence -- ordering Americans to accept illegally present third worlders in their midst because any life outside the U.S. is a living hell, while taking on the citizenship of one of these places that supposedly has no human dignity. His choice of the name Leo has those contradictions, too: One of the Pope Leos in the past built the walls that now surround the Vatican.
If he changes his approach to 'mercy' for illegals who have done wrong by breaking U.S. immigration law, instead of 'rights' or 'justice' for illegals on the NGO combative social-justice model, he might get a better reception than the last pope did, who was clearly meddling in U.S. politics. Americans like to be merciful. They are sick of being guilty.
But he hasn't said that. And perhaps he won't, as word gets out that entry to the U.S. can only be done by the legal process and the reality sinks in as the new normal.
It's intriguing that he kind of looks like Pope John Paul II, which might have gotten him some votes, and that he hasn't said anything noxious so far.
It's also not that surprising that he's American -- the Vatican gets most of its money from the U.S. parishioners, that the U.S. should not have a pope as a result is nonsense. Picking an American to serve as pope may have been, cynically speaking, a bid to influence us.
It's early, of course, and everything I am surmising about him could be wrong. We will know more as he makes his address next week. But for now, we can be hopeful that there may be many good and great things about him and he will be an able and confident leader, like Leo XIII.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/the_new_pope_leo_xiv_gives_us_reasons_to_hope.html
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