As cheers of the faithful welcomed white smoke over the Sistine Chapel, Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost was, in one of the most remarkable transformations in religious life, becoming Leo XIV. His predecessor’s choice of the name Francis was an early signal of his pastoral vision, inspired by St. Francis of Assissi, of a “poor Church for the poor.” Benedict XVI’s choice made a nod to St. Benedict of Nursia, a symbol of spiritual rebuilding.

So what does the choice of Leo signify? While the new pontiff has yet to offer any explanation on this head, some are looking to the tenure of Leo XIII, who was pope between 1878 and 1903, for clues. For one thing, historian George Weigel points out, the last Leo “was a great supporter of the church in the United States,” and “there would be a certain symmetry to a pope, Leo XIV, coming from the United States.”

Francis’s choice in 2023 to name Cardinal Prevost to serve as the head of the church office that vets nominations for bishops, and his subsequent elevation in 2025 to the highest order of cardinals, suggest that the prelate who would become Leo XIV had his immediate predecessor’s backing for the position. The Associated Press describes him as Francis’s “heir apparent,” suggesting that the church is poised to continue on a path of cautious liberalization. 

This is not to say that Leo XIV is likely to emerge as a “woke pope,” to use a term bandied by some critics. In 2012 he condemned the Western press for its “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel,” pointing to the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners.” While serving as a bishop in Peru, he said that “the promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.” 

Yet in terms of larger questions of the church’s role in the world, a look at Leo XIII’s yields some illuminating insights. The earlier pope is credited for having opened the Vatican archives, encouraging scholarship in the interest of reconciling science and faith, and fostering a revival in interest in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom he called “the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith.”

Leo XIII, too, took an interest in the economic and political questions that were roiling the West in the late 19th century. In 1891, just a few years after the death of Karl Marx, Leo XIII, in a papal pronouncement, weighed in on what he called the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” Leo XIII cited concerns about “the spirit of revolutionary change,” which he warned was “disturbing the nations of the world.” 

Leo XIII also lamented that “working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.” The pope urged that “some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” It has the ring of what would become known as “Liberation Theology” in the 1960s and 1970s avant la lettre. 

Could Leo XIV be planning a revival of some of his predecessor’s crusading tendencies on economic questions? If so, it would echo Francis’s call in 2019 for “a different kind of economy: one that brings life not death, one that is inclusive and not exclusive, humane and not dehumanizing.” At a time when the church seeks to reverse its marginalization in the West, no doubt millions will be asking whether this represents a path forward.

The conclave’s choice of Leo XIV suggests an endorsement of Francis’s approach on this question, but, for now, the course of the church is in the hands of a pontiff who has been called the least American of the Americans. The dilemma facing the new pope, as Mr. Weigel reckoned before the conclave, is whether the church will “accommodate itself to the modern world, as liberal Protestantism has done,” or “seek to convert the contemporary world.”