HH: I have been spending the morning listening to the American cardinals talk about Leo XIV and reading about Leo XIV, because like you, I am a Catholic. I’m wondering what your reaction is, sort of at length over the course of the day since that news came down?
JDV: Yeah, well, look, I watched with baited breath. I think they, you know, they let the white smoke go off, and then they just sort of, you know, hold us there without giving us the news. I was starting to sort of, you know, I was watching it with my staff, and I was like, my God, we’ve had white smoke for a long time. Why can’t they just, you know, show this guy, because I was on the edge of my seat like a lot of other people. I mean, look, I have a few thoughts in response, Hugh. First of all, a big moment, of course, for American Catholics, and I think the American people, writ large. So many people my entire lifetime has said you’re never going to have an American pope. Obviously, now we do, so I think that’s a great thing. The second thing I’d say is you know, we don’t know a whole lot about him, but I just wish him the best, right? I’m a Catholic. He’s now the head of the Catholic Church, and we’ll pray for his wisdom, for his good decisions, and his good health, and hope that he has a long and successful papacy. And then the third thing, Hugh, and this is, you know, these things always get discolored a little bit by American politics or by politics writ large. You know, people are asking is he a conservative or is he a liberal. Will he attack President Trump and J.D. Vance on certain things, and hasn’t attacked Democrats on other things. And I guess my response to this is it’s very hard to fit a 2,000-year-old institution into the politics of 2025 America. I try not to do that. I am a Catholic convert, and so I come at this maybe with a slightly different perspective. But I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game. I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.
Related: Why Pope Leo XIV probably isn’t that liberal. “Crucially, in a 2012 address to bishops, Prevost took a dim view of the popular culture that fostered ‘sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.’ Two cases in point being the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ and ‘alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.’ And as a bishop in Chiclayo in Peru, he opposed a government plan to add teachings on gender in schools. ‘The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,’ he told journalists. Granted, he may have changed during Francis’s pontificate, but all that sounds to me like normal Catholic teaching, not the kind of approach that progressive Catholics might favor. Let’s see what he actually says in the job.”
