When the conclave concluded after what felt like a whirlwind from May 7 to May 8, many jaws—including mine—were on the floor as Pope Leo XIV stepped out on the central balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica. It took a few seconds for the information to get blasted out onto the airwaves and across the Internet, and then some additional seconds for my stunned brain to process what I was seeing and reading on screen: an American pope!
But soon thereafter, even more came to light about this soft-spoken man of faith: He’s from Chicago, but is he a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan? He’s a Midwesterner, but his mother’s roots reach deep into the multiracial cultural identity of the Creole people in New Orleans. He’s an American, but he has spent more of his life outside of the United States than in it, and his decades of ministry and service in Chiclayo, Peru, resulted in him becoming a Peruvian citizen in 2015. This complexity of Pope Leo XIV’s background, which almost takes the form of duality, is very much a part of his appeal and approach to the faith, and likely had a hand in his election.
When we look around our Church today as the global entity that it is, many of the seemingly disparate facets of the new leader of our faith start to congeal and make sense for a pope at this time in history. And though many groups can legitimately claim him—Americans, the Augustinian Order to which he belongs, Peruvians, and White Sox (or is it Cubs?) fans—his identity as a missionary remains the central hub.
From Chicago to Chiclayo
“We must seek together how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square [St. Peter’s Square] with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, and love,” said Pope Leo. With two additional mentions of “mission” or “missionary” in his short speech, it’s clear how important this point is for him.
For our new pope to lean into the Church as a mission is really at the core of the Gospel. Early on, St. Paul took missionary zeal to another level, spreading God’s word far and wide. In a sense, St. Francis of Assisi was a missionary—and certainly not a crusading knight, as he once hoped to be—when he met and dialogued with Sultan Malik al-Kamil in Egypt. Pope Francis explicitly called for “a missionary Church that walks with her Lord through the streets of the world” (concluding Mass of the October 2024 Synod on Synodality).
What I believe Pope Leo and so many before him are trying to impress on us, the people of faith, is that every interaction, every relationship we have, can have some element of mission service to it, if we shift our thinking. Yes, there are those whose mission is at the outer rings of the margins. But our loved ones, coworkers, and neighbors can also be where our mission is. Whether via Chicago or via Chiclayo, Pope Leo XIV’s mission of love now extends to the whole world, which so desperately needs healing.
