Leo from Chicago

Assessments of the recent election of Bishop Robert Prevost as pope have highlighted the significance of his chosen name—Leo XIV. Many have read into that choice the notable parts of the last pope named Leo, Leo XIII (1878-1903), who was sandwiched between two of the most conservative popes in modern church history—Pius IX (1846-1878) and Pius X (1903-1914). While those popes warned against the dangers of modern society—secularization, higher criticism, naturalism, materialism, and even democracy itself—Leo XIII established Thomism as the foundation for the church’s educational system. Leo XIII also addressed the challenges of the industrial revolution and reactions to it (such as socialism and Communism). Leo XIV’s name leads many to hope that intellectual conservatism and flexibility on economics will characterize the next papacy.

A related piece of Leo XIII’s legacy may speak directly to questions surrounding the first American pope. Hugh Hewitt has wondered, for instance, if Leo XIV will be friendlier to the United States than Francis was. From likely knowing the lyrics “of at least one, if not all, of the theme songs of Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres or Mister Ed,” to rooting for the Chicago White Sox and the Villanova University Wildcats, Leo has American culture in his bones in ways that will make it hard for him to view the United States as hostile to the church. As a Baby Boomer, the pope will “get ‘Laugh In’ references, Farah Fawcett posters, Saturday Night Fever, and Jaws,” Hewitt adds. Rather than an odd and vulgar society, the new pope may regard America as ordinary—even normal.

If true, Leo XIV will have a very different view of America than his namesake, Leo XIII. In all of the commentary about his achievements, writers have ignored Leo XIII’s condemnation of Americanism as a heresy. Granted, his encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899) was mild in tone and short on specifics—especially compared to the lengthy critiques of modern society that Pius IX and Pius X produced. Still, for almost six decades, priests, bishops, and the religious in the United States needed to be careful when discussing the place of Roman Catholicism in American society.

Pope Leo XIII Associated Press photo

The occasion for Leo XIII’s encyclical was actually a controversy in France. There the legacy of the French Revolution had unsettled the church (an understatement). But priests who wanted to make Roman Catholicism compatible with the French Republic, looked to the American church for inspiration. A biography of Isaac Hecker, the American founder of the Paulist Fathers, translated into French, shed light on ways to make the church compatible with liberal democracy. Harmonizers promoted the efforts of Americans like Hecker while conservatives defended hierarchy as valuable for both church and society. A pro-French introduction to the biography set off alarms in the Vatican, which led to Leo XIII’s rejection of Americanism. While the pope wrote warmly of the United States and encouraged the American church to continue its ministry among Americans, Leo condemned efforts to conform the church’s structures and teachings to American habits. Leo worried that ideals of equality and liberty might sustain assumptions that all people were naturally virtuous or that freedom of thought was a welcome trait among believers.

No major fallout came from this encyclical, but its restrictions did linger until the 1960s. During the decade after World War II when anti-Catholicism grew in popularity by attention to Paul Blanshard’s bestselling book, American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949), John Courtney Murray, a priest teaching at a Jesuit seminary in Woodstock, Md., defended Roman Catholicism by arguing that the American Founders had used medieval Natural Law teaching as the basis for government and civil liberties. Murray’s superiors and Vatican officials condemned Murray’s views, however. For almost a decade he could not publish on church-state relations (or used a pseudonym when he did). With the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, Murray resurfaced in discussions of Roman Catholicism and American government. In fact, Time magazine put Murray on its Dec. 12, 1960 cover, only five weeks after Kennedy’s victory. The first Roman Catholic president apparently confirmed Murray’s views about the church’s capacity to adapt to liberal democracy. Then came Vatican II when bishops formulated Dignitatis Humanae (1965), a declaration that gave the church’s approval to religious freedom and diversity.

Many observers regarded Vatican II as a vindication of Murray, but it was also in effect a soft rejection of Leo XIII’s condemnation of Americanism. What this see-saw between Leo XIII and Vatican II means for the current pope is impossible to tell. But it is a question no less important than either a pope’s social teaching or educational philosophy. Thanks to the appeal of Integralism among American Catholic intellectuals—the idea that church and state need to cooperate to cultivate a godly society—Leo’s decision to use the name of an anti-American pope may provide more room for post-liberal critiques of the United States. Instead of being a reassuring sign of the new pope’s convictions, his name could send signals that an ordinary American—clergy or laity—runs contrary to one of the most thoughtful popes of the church’s recent past.