The day after Pope Francis died, my wife and I bought plane tickets to Rome. We weren’t interested in being there for the conclave. Like professional football, that extravaganza is best enjoyed on television. But we did want to be in Rome the following year for the new pope’s first Easter as Supreme Pontiff.
We had no idea who he would be — no one did at that time — but we already felt a loyalty to the guy, an instinctive desire to cheer him on when he led the Church through its most important celebration of the year.
Imagine our reaction when we learned that the pope was one of our own, an American. My family was gathered around my laptop in our living room watching the EWTN livestream. When the announcement was made, my two children, too young really to understand what they were watching, began bouncing up and down on the couch.
My wife and I, by this point well conditioned to disappointment in the Vatican, were more circumspect. An American pope: What could this mean? We were excited while his identity was unknown and when the future of the Church was a blank slate. But now that we knew a few things about him, we were ready to be disillusioned.
All my doubt vanished as soon as Pope Leo XIV stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. It wasn’t anything he said, or even the fact that he wore the traditional mozzetta, a contrast to his predecessor that was much remarked on at the time. It was just his smile. We make most of our judgments about people based on body language, and in Leo’s face I saw something familiar. He has a Midwestern grin — modest, self-effacing, almost as if he is trying to hide his teeth. I liked him immediately.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter, strictly speaking, whether or not Catholics like the pope. But it certainly helps. For the next few weeks, every time I called one of my siblings on the phone — there are seven of us — we referred in jokey terms to “Pope American” or “Pope Chicago” or the “Midwestern Pontiff.” We hung pictures of Leo in our houses. I drove my wife crazy adapting his name to the opening lines of famous American novels. That bit started with Saul Bellow’s “Adventures of Augie March” (“I am an American, Chicago born”), but soon ran further afield.
Leo became the hero of Don DeLillo’s baseball novel “Underworld” (“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful”) and the subject of that inane refrain in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” (“Listen: Pope Leo has come unstuck in time”). Perhaps we could have been more pious in our expressions, but I like to think we were only bringing Leo into the family. My whole life, the appellation “Holy Father” was a somewhat abstract concept. Now that I have a pope who could actually be my father, it feels more immediate, real.
A year on, I still catch myself repeating the phrase — an American pope. It’s only natural to be proud of the fact. But I suspect that as the years go by, that sentiment will develop into something more mature. Leo may be the American pope, but he is pope for everyone else, too.
Perhaps that is why he refrained from speaking his native tongue when he first stepped out onto that balcony. He is also relatively young and could very well be pope for 20 years. That’s a long time, and no one knows what the future may bring. I may come to disagree with him, even dislike him. But I am not overly concerned about that. I have loved even the more unpopular popes of recent memory. After all, the Church makes certain claims — to universality, to longevity — that elevate Her above our likes and dislikes.
In any case, my family did make it over to Rome for Leo’s first Easter. With two children under 5, there was no chance that we would attend the vigil in St. Peter’s. But on Easter morning, we tramped down to St. Peter’s Square along with everyone else in the city to receive the urbi et orbi blessing. It was a beautiful, temperate day, not a cloud in the sky.
We arrived rather late, and found ourselves trapped at the back of the crowd, far enough down the Via della Conciliazione that we were jostling with the street salesmen. I put my older daughter on my shoulders so that she could see over the mass of people. Other fathers did the same with their children. We moved through the crowd like giraffes wading in deep water.
Around noon, the scarlet curtain of the balcony was pulled aside and Leo stepped out to deliver the blessing. Everyone erupted into applause and a hundred thousand cellphones were raised to capture the moment. None of us could see him clearly, let alone hear what he was saying. Later, we would read the text or find snippets of it on social media.
“Let those who have weapons lay them down!” Leo said, in what was interpreted as a criticism of United States foreign policy.
In the following weeks, the pope would be dragged into a distasteful argument with the Trump administration over the merits of the president’s war in Iran. The episode would only end after Trump had heaped insult after insult on Leo and, for many, broken the charm of an American in the Vatican.
But for those of us standing in St. Peter’s Square this Easter, none of that mattered. We were there because Christ is risen and his visible representative on Earth was leading us in celebrating his victory over death. From where I was standing, Leo was an indistinct blur, a figure I could hardly discern speaking on a balcony I could barely see. It was so unlike the day the white smoke billowed out of the Sistine Chapel. Then, I was excited because we have an American. Now, I am excited because we have a pope.
