Robert Prevost and Leo XIV

Who is Cardinal Robert Prevost? And why is that the wrong question?

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While the entire world is trying to find out more about who Prevost-now-Leo really is, the pontiff himself suggested in Rome last week that people are asking the wrong question.

Credit: Vatican Media.

In secular media, reporters and journalists have scoured Leo’s 400 tweets and retweets on twitter.com, circling especially around a recent tweet criticizing Vice President JD Vance’s February comments about immigration and the ordo amoris.

For many commentators, Leo is taken in primarily political terms, and the principal impetus for Leo’s election seen as a rebuke of Trumpism, on the global stage, an intended American foil to the American president.

Indeed, it’s likely that some consideration of the global political landscape factored into discussions about Leo’s election in this month’s conclave. And the pontiff has indeed expressed opposition to the immigration policies favored by the Trump administration and other emergent right-leaning populist political leaders, while aiming to advance a vision of contemporary social and economic ethics rooted in the Francis views articulated in Laudato si.

In fact, the pope’s choice of Leo XIV — confirmed by Vatican officials to be in homage to Leo XIII — indicates the pontiff’s desire to develop Catholic social teaching, seemingly in response to the moment’s “change of era” so often flagged by Pope Francis.

Leo himself has said that he took the name of the venerable Pope Leo XIII — another canon lawyer — because of a pressing need for Catholic social teaching to address “another industrial revolution,” and “developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labor.”

But social doctrine is not the same as politics. And the pope was not principally elected to respond to a particular political figure like Trump, no matter how large the U.S. president looms on the world stage.

Indeed, as accounts of the conclave began to emerge, the prevailing suggestion is that Leo XIV was elected because of his perceived capacity to address issues in the life of the Church, and because of a sense that he had emerged during the Vatican’s general congregations as the leader who could unite a divided college of cardinals in the face of clear challenges for the Church, while providing clarity on doctrinal issues.

But again: Who is Cardinal Prevost, and how will he accomplish any of that as Leo XIV?

Since his election, Catholics have been dug deep on the internet to find as much about Prevost-before-Leo as can be found.

The sum total of information presents a complex picture.

In one video, taken at a U.S. parish nine months ago, Leo-then-Prevost offers a vigorous defense of Pope Francis’ initiatives in the Church, including the controversial synod on synodality.

But unlike cardinals who framed synodality as something completely novel, or as the singular mode of understanding the Church itself, or as a means of changing the Church’s doctrine, Prevost acknowledged that synodality has already been an operative part of the Church’s life in many places, seemingly including the U.S.

In the same interview, Prevost acknowledged that Francis was “not always understood” in the U.S., and recognized that created hardship in the Church.

To some observers, the cardinal’s articulation of synodality was the one they had hoped Francis himself would make — perhaps confirming Prevost’s sense that Francis was frequently misunderstood by Americans.

But for others, the matter in which the future pope spoke might have revealed as much about him as the things he said.

More than once in the interview, discussing synodality, Cardinal Prevost said the idea was an important or meaningful way of “being Church.”

For some, that syntax — use of the term “being Church,” with scarcely an article in sight — might well have put their teeth on edge. For some U.S. Catholics, that kind of speech is low-key lib-coded, evocative of the sort of 80s Catholicism beset with vibes over docrtine, felt banners, campy liturgy, and the soft clericalism of low expectations.

But in the very same video, Prevost praised the National Eucharistic Congress, which took place last year, and urged Catholics to proclaim the Gospel. And in other interviews, speeches, and videos which have emerged, what’s most consistent is a priest, and recently bishop, who seems to emphasize knowing Jesus Christ, in the Word of God, and in the Church’s sacramental life.

And the pontiff’s vision for evangelization is one that seems to be borne of deep anthropological reflection — and one the demands every Christian be an missionary.

“My vocation, like that of every Christian, is to be a missionary, to proclaim the Gospel wherever one is,” Prevost — a college-aged cofounder of Villanovans for Life — told a journalist some years ago.

In short, the picture that emerges of Fr. Prevost, Bishop Prevost, or Cardinal Prevost, is a fascinating one: A man who is in some senses is a product of his era, who at times uses the phrases of a certain kind of American religious of his vintage, and earnestly promotes the synodality priority of Pope Francis — while he in other contexts presents as a thinker drawing deeply from the well of Catholic intellectual tradition, more in the line of Pope Benedict XVI than his successor.

The picture is made more tangled as reports emerge about the disparate members of the College of Cardinals reported to have supported Prevost’s candidacy, or with whom he apparently caucused ahead of the conclave: Maradiaga, Dolan, and even reportedly Burke.

So who really is Cardinal Prevost?

Well, according to the pope himself, that doesn’t matter. The question, to him, is the wrong one.

During a May 9 Mass offered with cardinals in the Sistine Chapel to close the conclave which elected him, the first American pontiff said something not especially American: That those with a “ministry of authority” — like the pope himself — should learn to “move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified, to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him.”

That seems to be the plan exemplified by Leo thus far: to “make himself small,” as he takes up an office much larger than any one man — to yield his preferences (whatever they might be) to the customs and traditions of the Petrine office.

Better it seems, to Leo, to ask a more fundamental question: Who is Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God?

Over time, to be sure, more of Prevost’s own personality and priorities will be seen in the exercise of Peter’s keys. But if the pontiff was serious about his commitment — and there are indications in every public appearance that he was — we may see a pontificate governed not by the pope’s own preferences, but by his sense of how to achieve unity, peace, and holiness in a broadly diverse Church.

Along the way, we may learn relatively little about the particularities of Robert Prevost, as instead Leo XIV aims to display to the world only Jesus Christ himself.

After a pontificate in which the man himself, with all his foibles and quirks, was prominently at the center of the story, that would be a change for Catholics everywhere.