Why the pope needs friends

Pontiffs are people too. And tending to their humanity matters.

Pope Leo XIV visited the Santa Monica International College on Sunday, where he joined the celebration for the 70th birthday of his friend, Fr. Alejandro Moral, prior general of the Augustinians.

A picture of the papal visit made its way online. It showed the pope huddled with several of his confreres, apparently sharing something amusing on an iPhone over the birthday cake.

Pope Leo XIV attends the birthday of Fr. Alejandro Moral, June 1, 2025. Credit: Fondazione Agostiniani nel Mondo.

It’s a happy, seemingly candid shot. All the more so in that it made its way into the public eye via the Augustinians’ Facebook page, not through official Vatican media. Leo, it seems, is happy to return to his former religious community on friendly, informal, if perhaps not exactly equal terms, following his election.

Leo’s network of friends — from the Augustinian order and his former diocese in Chiclayo — and family have already become something of a feature of his pontificate, still less than a month old. In the days following his election, his brother John visited for pizza in the Apostolic Palace.

Being Bishop of Rome is perhaps one of the most isolating jobs in the world, if not the most — unlike a secular head of state, popes are expected to set a perpetual spiritual and moral example, in addition to shouldering administrative duties and wielding governing authority.

Obviously, the preeminent and most determinative relationship any pope has is with the Lord, and their private prayer and spiritual lives are perhaps the most formative upon every pontificate, even if their effects are impossible to assess from the outside.

But human relationships matter, too. A lot.

In addition to being the superior of every person in the room, the pope is — fairly or unfairly — often treated as a kind of oracle, with every papal joke or aside picked apart, and every candid remark turned over for deeper meaning.

As such, having a trusted circle with whom the pope can “be himself,” from whom he can get honest advice, for whom he doesn’t have to perform, is almost essential if the pope is to be able to govern effectively and keep his sanity in office.

Leo is hardly the first pope to rely on his own inner circle of friends and family. Benedict XVI was known to host regular dinners — with traditionally outsized beers — for his former doctoral students, and he was in constant close contact with his brother Georg, also a priest.

Pope St. John Paul II was also known to maintain a private network of friends with whom he would, literally, escape the pressures of Vatican life, packing up into an unmarked car with two Polish priest friends and escaping for mountain vacations. St. John Paul even developed a close friendship with the family of Lino Zani, a mountaineer and ski instructor.

Leo’s immediate predecessor, Pope Francis, on the other hand, often seemed to lack a similar network of close friends and family. The eldest of five children, Francis had only one surviving sibling, a sister whom he never saw in person again after his election, for various reasons including her health and the pope’s decision not to visit his home country of Argentina.

As for close friends, Francis, unlike Leo, had an often strained relationship with his own religious order, the Jesuits. Rather than attending birthday parties with friends among the leadership, Francis developed the habit of holding small but public audiences with seminarians of the order during his overseas trips.

Back in Rome, many attributed Francis’ decision to remain in the Domus Sancta Marta guest house (instead of moving into the Apostolic Palace) to loneliness and fear of isolation by Francis, as didn’t have a natural circle of friends to invite over.

Some close to the papal orbit also credited the lack of close friends with Francis’ habit in the early years of his pontificate of granting long, informal, quasi-interviews to the Italian atheist journalist Eugenio Scalafari.

The result of this lack of a circle of confidantes separate to his office and role as pope was, at least according to some, that Francis was often eager for company and left himself susceptible to flattery and lobbying, as well as bouts of isolation and loneliness, both of which could leave him irritable and suspicious of people’s motives.

For Leo, having a close network of friends on whom he can rely for personal and emotional support is no fringe benefit. Rather it could prove crucial to the ultimate success of his time in office.

Ahead of the new pope are several pressing reform projects, including the need to appoint, albeit gradually, his own slate of dicastery prefects and senior staff and also — rather more urgently — reform the Vatican’s finances.

Both jobs will require hard, and at times unpopular, decisions and likely engender considerable push-back, institutional resistance, and even ill-feeling among Vatican officials of all ranks.

The opportunity for Leo to “leave the office” for periods of time, whether physically or emotionally or both, could prove an essential outlet for him in his work, one which doesn’t just sustain him personally and emotionally, but also leaves him better placed to deal dispassionately with the more thorny administrative issues and curial personality politics which come with leading the Vatican.

Of course, it isn’t just the pressures of administration and human resources which will weigh on the papal mind and require reliable friends to help relieve the burden. Pope Leo has also inherited the ongoing project of synodality in the Church, practically rooted in the ongoing synodal process.

Critics of that project have complained that synodal sessions, organized by the permanent secretariat in Rome, became at times a game of insider politics — with special prominence and weight given to participants with personal connections or sympathies with officials and, through special papal appointees, Francis.

Assuming he chooses to continue with the slated series of synodal assemblies through 2028, Leo will have to balance his own vision for the process alongside fostering the kind of consensus by communion which some have complained has undermined the process so far.

Here again, having friends and family separate from ecclesiastical power politics and available to give support and feedback to Leo primarily as the man, not the pope, could prove a vital support for him.

While it is often said one can judge a man by his friends, in the case of a pope it’s perhaps more important to know that he has them at all.

Of course, paradoxically, Leo may end up with a reverse problem to Francis — having too many friends. As an active local bishop in Peru and then prefect of an influential dicastery in Rome, Leo was well known and liked across several countries.

If social media is to be believed, he received — and in many cases responded to — dozens, if not hundreds, of messages of congratulations from cardinals, bishops, priests, and lay people who had his personal cell phone number.

Of course, the papacy simply doesn’t allow time for its occupants to keep up with every acquaintance they have made over the years, and Leo will inevitably have to prioritize his personal address book as much as his official inbox.

In doing so, he might be well advised, however, to make a space for those friends — especially lay friends — most distant from the Vatican world, and unrelated to the workings of the institutional Church in their daily lives.

Those friends could prove to be the best support and the most honest sounding boards for the new pope. More importantly, they are the hardest for any pope to replace.