News broke last week that Pope Leo XIV has, under his prepontifical name of Robert Francis Prevost, registered for an absentee ballot to vote in the United States midterm elections.
The news triggered a wave of surprised commentary, most of it arguing against the notion that a reigning pontiff could or should participate in the civil affairs of his country of citizenship.
Objections to the idea of a pope voting have ranged from the practical, that it opens Leo and the petrine office up to a host of legal complications, to the conceptual that he has failed to grasp the full personification of his office as a universal figure and global leader of the Church.
The thrust of the criticism of Robert Prevost’s decision to vote mostly boils down to the argument that Robert Prevost, the man and private citizen, no longer exists. From the moment he spoke the word accepto in the 2025 conclave and announced his regnal name, there is only Pope Leo XIV, and he, as pope, is, and must be, a citizen of nowhere.
But, in an age where the sovereignty of the Vatican City State is increasingly being distanced from the person of the pope, and after Benedict XVI’s historic decision to resign the Petrine office and live for nearly a decade in retirement, is there a case to be made that Prevost the man and Leo the pope can legally coexist?
The pope seems to be attempting, more than any of his predecessors, to draw a line between Pope Leo XIV and the man Robert Prevost, even joking about it in the low-stakes (to some) context of college basketball this weekend.
Whether the pope’s approach can work may hinge less on legalities, and more on the ability of the pope to maintain a truly private thought, preference, or judgment in the era of obsessive papal news coverage.