I am at home today, and gave a lecture on global politics at the Irish College in Leuven this morning. I do that kind of thing fairly often, but today I had to change my usual script to take account of yesterday’s events.

Pope Leo XIV comes to power at a moment when the right wing of the Catholic church in the USA is being instrumentalised as part of the Trump MAGA movement, and some are choosing to interpret the papal election in that light. Cardinal Prevost was probably the least American of the American cardinals, and his social media record is one of clapping back at J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. But that really isn’t the place to start, and it probably isn’t even the important part.

What struck me, the moment that the new Pope opened his mouth, is that his Italian is fluent and (as far as I could tell) without an American accent. A little digging and I found that his paternal grandfather, Jean/John Prevost (1876-1960) was born in Turin, Italy, and ran a language school in Chicago; his grandson was only four when he died, but the Pope’s father Louis Marius Prevost (1920-1997) was also a teacher and school administrator. Perhaps in the multicultural neighbourhood of Denton, there was an opportunity for a bright kid to pick up on languages.

The Pope’s paternal grandmother Suzanne Louise Marie Fontaine (1894-1979) was from Le Havre in France. She and Jean were already married at the point that Suzanne moved to the United States in 1917, and moved to Chicago before the Pope’s father was born in 1920. Some sources suggest that Suzanne’s mother’s maiden name was also Prevost, which suggests that she and her husband Jean/John were related (and the fact that he was known as “Jean” suggests close French ties) but the evidence is circumstantial and ambiguous.

The Pope’s mother, Mildred Agnes Martinez (1911-1990) is described in press reports as of Spanish descent. This is not the whole truth. Her father, Joseph Norval Martinez (1864–1926), was born in Haiti shortly before his family moved to New Orleans, and her mother Louise Baquie (1868–1945) was a Seventh Ward Creole; both are recorded as “mulatto” along with the rest of their families in the 1870 census, but as “white” in the 1880 census, which demonstrates the social construction of race. “Martinez” is obviously a Spanish name, so describing Mildred’s ancestry as Spanish is convenient shorthand.

So although the Pope’s parents were both born in Chicago, his four grandparents were born in four different countries. That in itself doesn’t guarantee anything of course (Donald Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, and his father’s family were all first or second generation German immigrants) but it’s an interesting start.

(Also I wonder who the last Pope with a degree in mathematics was.)

But even before the new Pope opened his mouth to speak fluent Italian (and Spanish), an important signal came from his choice of name. People have been having a lot of fun with the more dubious historical popes who took the name Leo, notably Leo IX who is generally regarded as responsible for the Great Schism of 1054, and Leo X whose sale of indulgences for the construction of St Peter’s was one of the triggers of the Reformation. (Add also Leo VIII, who was Pope twice, though is officially regarded as having been an antipope first time round.)

The new chap is too smart not to be aware of these, but for today’s Vatican the most recent Leo is the most important. Leo XIII became Pope just before his 68th birthday in 1878, and ruled for 25 years. Leo XIV is 69 and looks in good shape, and one message from his choice of name is that he expects to be around for a good while. I myself just turned 58; it’s weird to think that the next Pope will probably be younger than me. (And the one after certainly will be.)

Leo XIII pulled the church past the traumas of the unsuccessful conservatism of Pius IX, who had catastrophically lost the Papal States to the new Kingdom of Italy. He reopened the Vatican observatory and insisted that science and religion should coexist. But he is particularly remembered for Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical which commits the church to the amelioration of “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.”

Leo XIII was not a socialist – indeed Rerum novarum was very much an anti-socialist document. But it was a conscious effort to position the church on the progressive side of political discourse, and it’s the intellectual basis for the more centrist European tradition of Christian Democracy (which has been rather weaker of late). I think it’s fair to describe Leo XIII as the least right-wing Pope since the term “right-wing” acquired political meaning. The new guy’s choice of the same name is a strong indicator that he’s heading in a similar political direction.

These things are relative of course. Leo XIII criticised Irish Nationalism, which certainly puts him on the wrong side of history. Leo XIV is, to put it politely, on a personal journey with regard to LGBTQ+ issues; though better informed observers than me find the initial signs encouraging.

Incidentally the speed of the election shows that the media narrative of the strength of the hard-line right-wing factions among the College of Cardinals was overblown. There is no way that Leo XIV can be regarded as anything other than the continuity candidate for Francis, breaking the traditional cycle of alternation between moderates and conservatives. The cardinals would have been very aware that voting for the man who selected Francis’s bishops was not going to turn the clock back, and it took them roughly 24 hours of actual voting time to get there.

One other thing to mention is that a couple of years ago I connected with my second cousin once removed Christopher Lamb, whose great-grandmother was my grandfather’s sister. He is now CNN’s Vatican correspondent, so he’s had three of the most significant weeks of his career since Easter Monday.

For myself, having been brought up Catholic, I have very much drifted away from the church in recent years. However I did attend the 1 May service at our local chapel last week. This place of ancient devotion celebrates just four masses a year, on 2 February, 1 May, 15 August, 1 November and 25 December; the ancient quarter days (Lammas shifted by a fortnight) and Christmas. The May ritual is dedicated to the Mother of Christ, whose statue miraculously appeared on the site in the late middle ages (and was stolen in 1974). Its replacement presides over the open air Mass (in good weather, which we had last week). Devotional hymns are sung.

The chapel is located right beside a holy well, and across the valley from two once-grand Bronze Age burial mounds. 1 May is Beltane in the old Celtic calendar, or Walpurgis Night here, when fires were lit to ward off evil and greet the turning of the seasons. So the candles lit by the congregation last week, and the procession around the Zoete Waters (sadly drained dry for maintenance at the moment), were part of a cycle of annual commemoration on or near that spot that probably goes back well before Christianity. I enjoyed the feeling of connection to the history of this place and this time of year.

Unexpectedly the service was a moment of geographical as well as historical connection. Under the late Pope Francis, the People’s Republic of China and the Church negotiated a reset of relations, though the process of appointing bishops is still a matter of dispute. (Hmm, and remind me who was staffing the Vatican side of that dispute until yesterday?) I know I keep saying this, but the rise of China is the central geopolitical fact in today’s world. Leuven has a long connection with China going back to Ferdinand Verbiest, and twenty visiting Chinese priests were in the congregation along with us locals. During the procession they belted out Chinese hymns.

The church’s central problems remain the same – falling numbers of worshippers, decreasing relevance, appalling failure to come to terms with the abuses of the past. I tend to think that if the answers can be found, it will be by looking forward and outward rather than backward and inward; and I am pleasantly surprised to find that the College of Cardinals (or at least two thirds of it) takes the same view.