Following Pope Leo XIV’s Inauguration Mass that officially began his papacy, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead? 23/05/2025

Since emerging from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica on 8th May 2025, much has been written about Pope Leo XIV. Commentators have explored his childhood and family, his Americanness, his missionary work and heart for Peru, his Augustinian roots, his political leaning, his choice of the name Leo…and even his favourite baseball team. But following the Inauguration Mass that officially began his papacy this week, what lies ahead for the new Pope?

As “sovereign over a territory in a world of states, a widely recognized diplomat in international affairs, and a leader of a transnational church in a religiously influenced global public sphere,”[1]  his main mission is to bring the Church – as state, as a diplomat, and all the Catholic faithful – along with all people of goodwill closer to Christ. What are some of the immediate challenges and opportunities facing Pope Leo XIV?

Territory – Vatican State

From the announcement of his election to the papacy, Pope Leo’s political leanings have been the subject of much scrutiny. The intensity is perhaps increased by him being American, with intrigue about the new Pope being framed within the broader discourse of a divided US politics. Pope Leo’s voting records in US elections, his old social media posts on X as the then Cardinal Robert Prevost have been uncovered to understand his positions on controversial issues and in relation to the Trump administration. For example, a particular focus has been given to his sharing of an article that criticised US Vice President JD Vance’s response to immigration and quoted in his post the article’s headline: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” Political labels, such as “left” and “right”, “progressive”, “moderate” and “conservative”, have been applied in the media discourse in the lead up to and during the conclave and have continued after the announcement of Pope Leo’s election. These political labels create an imaginary binary. A political spectrum that reduces complex information about the politics of an individual can be useful to translate political differences across cultures[2]. It allows individuals to readily understand leaders of states across a wide array of political issues, including the Pope who is the head of a state. But reducing Pope Leo, and any human for that matter, to merely these binary political positions completely belies the complexity, especially when they can inhabit multiple roles.

A major set of challenges for Pope Leo are “inside baseball” ones as head of state. Pope Francis began a major set of reforms, and has issued more legislative texts than any other Pontiff since the revision of the Code of Canon law in the 1980s. However, the momentum of the actual implementation of these reforms stalled in the face of significant opposition in the Curia[3] that has been publicly evident in the conviction of the former Sostituto of the Secretary of State[4] and the ongoing legal wrangling over the London Property Scandal. The affair was triggered by the Vatican’s Bank, reporting major pressure from the Secretary of State to refinance a loan on a property development project in London that was already running a loss and owned through a series of businessmen’s investment firms and shell companies. The ensuing investigation has led to criminal charges of ten individuals both clerics and lay people. There are widespread hopes that Pope Leo XIV, a canon lawyer himself, will revive some of these reforms, and bring a positive discipline back to the workings of the Curia.

This is more urgent than ever as the financial crisis of the Vatican State is now at a critical point, leading Pope Francis to reduce the salaries of Cardinals in Rome and end subsidies for their accommodations, as well as directing 90% of donations to St Peter’s Pence to overhead running costs of the Vatican. It is entirely possible that the Holy See will be bankrupt, particularly with the significant debts to their pension fund. Who bails out the Pope? We cannot imagine the International Monetary Fund doing so, but stranger things have happened. We shudder to think about the major conflicts which could arise between a profoundly liberal institution and an actor that sees the economy and material goods in a very different way. An American Pope could perhaps pull off such a deal, should it come to that. Either way, being an American will galvanise the generous and wealthy donor base of American Catholics, which may be key to solving the Vatican’s immediate crisis. 

Diplomacy – Pope as a peer in the society of states

On an international front, the Pope’s most significant challenge lies in the global political environment swinging from solidarist norms to pluralist norms (to use International Relations theory of the English School framing). “Solidarism” implies that states share a high degree of norms, rules and institutions and focus on cooperation, whilst “pluralism” suggests a low degree of shared norms, where rules and institutions amongst states focus on creating a framework for orderly coexistence and competition.[5] Russia annexing Crimea in 2014 and the ineffectual international response signalled the increasing momentum of this shift, and since then, we have had a full–frontal assault on Ukraine from Russia, the collapse of the Assad regime, the October 7 attack and subsequent Israel–Hamas war, numerous instances of boundary violations from China to its immediate neighbours are just the major notes. Popes have distinctly less room to influence both heads of state and public opinion in these kinds of environments due, in part, to the perceived naivety and weakness of overtures of peace and good will. However, their voice is still one allowed onto the global stage, a “pluralist” actor as such, as a peer in the society of states.

The Pope will also have to confront the realities of Churches caught in the middle of civil wars and failing states, such as Sudan, Nigeria, the West Bank and Gaza, Syria, Iraq and the DRC, and Churches proscribed by states such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria, Pakistan, and China where a bishop without papal mandate has been “elected” and “installed” by Xi Jinping’s regime during the interregnum. At the core of many of these difficult circumstances is a fundamental disagreement about the power that the state should have over the Church and vice versa. The upcoming renegotiation of the Vatican–China deal will be closely watched and will set the tone for Pope Leo XIV’s approach, in particular how much allowance the Holy See is going to give to states appointing bishops and controlling the local Church in dictatorial states.

Pope Leo’s first Urbi et Orbi blessing called for “one and all, to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, joining together as one people, always at peace.” Speaking to members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Leo emphasised three pillars of the Church’s missionary work and the aim of the Holy See’s diplomacy: peace, justice and truth. At the Inauguration Mass, state leaders and royalty sat side by side, listening to Pope Leo speak of the need for love and unity. Like popes before him, Pope Leo will have to straddle the “pluralist” and “solidarist” line, as a diplomat on the world stage bringing teachings of the Gospel to all.

Pope as head of a transnational church

Finally, the ability of the Pope to serve as a centre of gravity for the world’s Catholics is going to be tested. According to data from 2025 released by the Vatican’s Central Office of Church Statistics, 48% of the world’s Catholics belong to the Americas, 20% are from Africa, 11% from Asia, 20% from Europe and the remainder from Oceania. But as someone born in America, with European heritage, and substantial experience in South America and missionary work around the world – Pope Leo’s own personal experiences add further global dimensions to his papacy compared to his predecessors.

In a major way, his role as Head of a Universal Church will be tested by the German Bishops’ Synodal Weg initiative that has actively politicised the process of reform in the German Church. Out of a major damning report about the clerical sexual abuse crisis in Germany and in the face of collapsing numbers of Germans attending Mass and identifying as Catholic for tax purposes, the German Bishops and the National Catholic Lay Association launched a major initiative called Synodal Weg that has been advocating for a variety of liberalising reforms to the German Church, including female ordination, ability for lay councils to select and approve bishop appointments, among other controversial requests. A small number of bishops have resigned in protest over these matters and there have been major protests from both the Holy See and Bishops’ Conferences globally. Critics have described it as a highly politicised process that seems to have little to do with actually addressing the victims of historic sexual abuse of minors in concrete ways. Real fears of Schism and the Reformation part II are not unfounded, and Pope Leo’s diplomatic, theological and pastoral ability are likely to be truly tested in this arena.

A second underreported test for Pope Leo XIV’s pastoral nous resides in India, where a decade–long battle over the liturgical reform of the Syro–Malabar Church has been taking place, occasionally breaking out in violence and closing down the Cathedral in Kerala. The five million strong Eastern Catholic Church is the largest and most dynamic of the Eastern Catholic rites, with growing diaspora communities throughout the Anglosphere in particular. Pope Francis’ attempts to resolve the liturgy dispute, which exploded in 2021, were without success. The tension between the Syro–Malabar bishops and their priests and lay faithful have been fraught with growing bitterness and frustration on both sides. Whether and how Pope Leo XIV intervenes to resolve this dispute will be watched by the other Eastern rite Churches and plays into wider Anglosphere and European liturgical debates and the legacy of the Second Vatican Council.

For the wider Roman Catholic faithful, Pope Leo may have a hard time bringing the different factions of the Church together. Thus far, he has managed to rise above any single faction and there is perhaps a cautious optimism that maybe in Robert Prevost the Church has found someone who can thread the needle between the communities reviving pre–Vatican II liturgies and the “liberal–progressive” movements that have dominated the last 60 years of the liturgical life of the Church. As a shepherd to the flock, how well he can unite the Catholic faithful in and through the liturgy presents both challenges and opportunities for the new Pope to make his mark. From the homily at the Inauguration Mass, he certainly hopes the Church will be “a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world”.

For this is not a monolithic transnational church, but a transnational church of continuity and newness. Perhaps, fittingly, in the words of Saint Augustine, this is a church “ever ancient and ever new”,[6] which must respond to a world of “multiple modernities”.[7] Multiple modernities describes  social actors and movements in the world engaged in the pursuit of continually constituting and reconstituting in a multiplicity of ways their own views of what they believe makes a society modern.[8] What “newness” could the “ever ancient” address? In his address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo shed insight on this, saying,

Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

A transnational church to address new areas like developments in the field of artificial intelligence and yet connected to the Church’s social teaching speaks of the dual nature of continuity and newness that can be found in the Church. It is not necessarily a reflection of political ideology, which some may emphasis when viewing the Church through a political lens. Many will await the first papal encyclical of Pope Leo, whose teachings are not devised ex nihilo but embedded within the continuity of previous pontiffs and the traditions of the Church.

Conclusion: His mission is shepherding the flock to Christ

Pope Leo XIV has now officially begun his Petrine Ministry as the successor of St Peter and, therefore, as Pastor of the Catholic Church. At the rite of Inauguration, like many popes before, the Pallium (a liturgical vestment made from the wool of lambs evoking the image of the Good Shepherd carrying his flock on his shoulders) and the Ring of the Fisherman (a signet ring representing the seal of faith entrusted to Peter to strengthen his brethren and symbolising the continuous lineage to Peter) was conferred upon Pope Leo. At his first blessing, he said “I am an Augustinian, a son of Saint Augustine, who once said, ‘With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop.’ In this sense, all of us can journey together toward the homeland that God has prepared for us.” When speaking to the College of Cardinals he reminded them to be “docile listeners” to the voice of God and faithful ministers of His plan of salvation guiding and accompanying all holy people of God entrusted to their care. These allusions express the unifying nature of the Pope as a multilayered role to the Church and beyond. 

Ultimately, Pope Leo’s “multilayered actorness”[9] is to further the mission of the Church – which is to bring people to God. Pope Leo XIV has articulated this message clearly already. But how the Pope exerts his agency as a “multilayered actor” – as sovereign of a territorial state, as a diplomat, and as leader of a transnational church – will be one to watch. 

Kiara Black, Marianne Rozario and Christian Santos

Kiara Black recently completed an MA in International Relations on Pope John Paul II’s diplomatic relations with Mexico and the impact of his Pastoral Visits in the 1990s with the University of Notre Dame Australia. She is currently a wife and mother to three little girls and a baby boy in Sydney, Australia. 

Marianne Rozario holds a PhD in International Relations exploring the notion of Catholic agency in international society through the University of Notre Dame Australia, as well as a MA(Hons) in International Relations from the University of St Andrews. She is an Honorary Researcher for the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society, and a former Lecturer for St Mary’s University.

Christian Santos is a Sessional Academic at the University of Notre Dame Australia and Legal Counsel at the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. He holds a PhD in International Relations as well as a LLB and BA(Hons) in International Relations from the University of Notre Dame Australia.