Quiet American is an oxymoron for most people, at least those outside the United States. The British writer Graham Greene used the phrase as the title of his 1955 novel, describing a soft-spoken and well-meaning CIA agent who nevertheless causes havoc abroad. In my native Canada, our reserved self-image has no greater or more pleasing foil than our southern neighbor. Fairly or not, complaining about brash Americans is a national pastime.
And yet, over the past six months, the unthinkable has taken shape: a quiet American papacy. Given the intense national enthusiasm that followed Pope Leo XIV’s election, in May, perhaps the most striking feature of his papacy is how inconspicuous it’s been. A casual American observer likely hasn’t heard much about Leo—and certainly far less than they would have heard about Pope Francis’s first six months, in 2013. Compared with the U.S. president, Leo’s loudest compatriot, the pope has barely made a sound. His relative silence carries certain risks, but it might be exactly what American Catholics need right now.
[Read: The fraught relationship between a pope and his home]
Just because Leo’s papacy has been quiet doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy. In June, he convened tech leaders to discuss the dangers that the unchecked expansion of AI pose to human dignity. Later in the summer, he gave his first extended interview, affirming the Church’s teaching on human sexuality while expressing a commitment to welcoming LGBTQ Catholics. He has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. And last month, Leo issued his first major teaching document, Dilexi Te, which emphasized Christ’s love for the poor and condemned the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. “A culture still persists—sometimes well disguised—that discards others without even realizing it,” Leo wrote, “and tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings.” None of this generated many headlines, though, in part because none of it was new: Pope Francis had already articulated all of these views. He even wrote the first draft of Dilexi Te.
Unlike Leo, Francis commanded attention from the very start of his papacy, not because of his nationality but because of his actions, most notably his unconventional gestures of humility. On his first day as pope, he personally returned to the hotel where he’d stayed before the conclave to settle his bill. Francis chose to spend his tenure living in a modern guesthouse rather than the traditional and grander Apostolic Palace. Instead of washing the feet of priests—a tradition on Holy Thursday—he went to a youth prison to wash the feet of inmates.
Of his many news-making quotes, Francis delivered the most famous during his first press conference: Responding to a question about gay priests, he said, “Who am I to judge?” As was the case with that line, Francis’s papacy spawned a combination of enthusiasm, criticism, and anxiety among Catholics. These reactions largely mapped onto ideological divisions that predated Francis, but the Church no doubt grew more polarized during his leadership.
Francis drew the attention of the secular world, in particular, by taking on President Donald Trump. In 2016, the pope said that anyone “who thinks only of building walls”—the signature promise of Trump’s campaign—“is not Christian.” Earlier this year, Francis was even more direct, calling the president’s deportation plan a “disgrace.” Leo hasn’t completely shied away from challenging Trump: He’s referred to America’s handling of immigrants as “inhuman” and called on U.S. bishops to protect them. Most recently, he lamented the physical and spiritual mistreatment of migrants, calling for “deep reflection.” But unlike his predecessor, Leo hasn’t referred to Trump himself.
[Read: The Catholic Church and the Trump administration are not getting along]
Any pope’s influence on U.S. politics is going to be limited, but a more direct intervention from Leo could make a greater impact than those of his predecessors. The first American pope is uniquely positioned to challenge the “America First” president, not least because a majority of U.S. Catholics voted for Trump last year. This suggests that a substantial bloc of the president’s base could be receptive to papal counsel, even though many MAGA Catholics already regard Leo as an antagonist. Criticism from Leo would likely carry significant weight for non-Catholics too, given how few people in positions of authority have been willing to oppose Trump directly. Catholicism offers ample precedent for such a confrontation. Indeed, the pope’s original eponym, Leo I, issued one of the most potent challenges to secular power in Church history. In 452, as Attila the Hun marched on Rome, Leo I went out to meet the invading army and persuaded it to turn back, saving the seat of Christianity.
The threat that today’s Leo faces is certainly less dramatic. From one vantage, if he doesn’t wield his power more distinctly, his papacy could succumb to “vagueness and vapor,” as the New York Times columnist and prominent American conservative Catholic Ross Douthat warned—he could become a source of “pious-sounding exhortations that never condense into clear recommendations and whose applications seem to be overtaken by events.” Douthat was writing specifically about Dilexi Te, which he regarded as too imprecise to offer clear moral guidance or attract sufficient attention.
At the same time, more direct intervention carries its own dangers. A pope who arrogates attention and flexes the power of his singular office could worsen the problems of an era in which one-man rule is already ascendant. Global affairs are beginning to resemble earlier periods when absolutist rulers—both secular and religious—shaped the destiny of millions through sheer force of will. Leo’s papacy can be seen as a bulwark against this kind of regression. “I don’t see my primary role as trying to be the solver of the world’s problems,” Leo has said. “I don’t see my role as that at all, really, although I think that the Church has a voice, a message that needs to continue to be preached, to be spoken and spoken loudly.”
In so explicitly subordinating his own voice to that of the Church, Leo may be doing two shrewd things at once. First, he is starving the media of the conflict and drama they crave, especially in the United States. Second, and related, Leo could be buying his deeply polarized Church—in particular American Catholics—time to rebuild some measure of unity in the absence of papally generated controversy.
By granting the Church a moment of calm—at least relative to Francis’s tenure, when Catholics constantly fought over what they heard from Rome—Leo may also be creating the conditions for people to ask themselves how they can address the problems he’s identified, whether about poverty, inequality, or the treatment of migrants. In this sense, Leo’s quiet papacy might really be a provocation: Pay less attention to the Attilas of the present age, and more to what we ourselves are doing and failing to do.
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