Introduction by Andreas Telser
Pope Leo XIV. was elected on May 8, 2025. Depending on the confessional background, people have different perceptions of and expectations for the papacy. Willemien Otten, who serves as the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity at the prestigious Divinity School of the University of Chicago published this text on May 29, 2025.
For many years Otten also was the faculty co-director of the so-called Martin Marty Center, named after famous historian of religion Martin Marty (1928–2025). The Center was created by Marty as he recognized “the complex ways religion informs and shapes our world, as well as the important insights scholars can provide” to better understand this interrelation.
Otten’s article was originally published by Sightings, a digital magazine, “featuring […] articles by students, faculty, alumni, and guest writers, our digital magazine explores how viewing the world through the lens of religion can help us make sense of developments in politics, art, business, and other fields.”
In the fall of 2024, Prof Otten was an online guest speaker in a seminar at the Catholic Faculty of Theology at the University of Vienna, presenting the key aspects of her 2020 book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking.
A New Pope, A New Dawn by Willemien Otten
Personal reflections on the papacy, an American pontiff, and hope that faith and leadership may yet shape our fractured world.
When I taught at Boston College in the mid-nineties, the head of its Jesuit Institute, fittingly called Ignatius House, was Fr. Michael J. Buckley (1931–2019), trained at the Divinity School in Chicago in a time that there were no comparable Catholic institutions. At one point he was going off to a conference at the Vatican about the papacy and he decided to present his paper to the faculty before giving it in Rome. The theme of his paper was that the pope was before all a bishop and should see himself as a primus inter pares: not unlike the other bishops and only placed slightly higher. At the time, I made comments on the paper to the effect that, if you have a religious leader who is so much in the news and who can address even the United Nations, why would you want to scale back his tasks? Why not celebrate them, seeing them as representative of the world leader that he is, and in that way, give Catholicism a clear and overt voice in the debates of the day? Protestants like me do not have a respected, singular leader who can speak about what Protestantism is (not even evangelicals can speak in one voice), and one of the flaws of Protestantism is that it harbors a principle of fragmentation within itself. In my teaching of the Reformation at Boston College I always made it a point to state that Catholicism had a counter-reformation culminating in the Council of Trent while the reformed churches, whom Luther’s Letter to the German Nobility wanted to be ruled by a council, only had local or national synods. My Catholic colleagues were surprised by my comments, perhaps even pleasantly so, as they had never expected a Protestant to come out in support of the pope, playing him up whom they were wanting to take down a notch.
Fast forward thirty years, and we find ourselves with a new pope in what looks to be a new dawn, not just for Catholicism, but indeed for the world. He is not a Jesuit like Pope Francis, but he is an Augustinian, like Luther. More directly relevant may be that he is also from Chicago, is a White Sox fan, and studied at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park. I came out of the funeral service for Prof. David Tracy, when I learnt there was a new pope, but I didn’t yet know who it was. I couldn’t believe my ears when I next heard that it was an American pope. It almost felt as if Tracy had had a hand in it. The Chicago flag may well get a new star to celebrate his ascendancy.
The overlapping crises of this moment have made the weight of expectations on Pope Leo XIV impossibly heavy. The war in Ukraine, abandoned by President Trump even as it is continued with ever more intensity by President Putin, is now perhaps left for the pope to resolve. In a time when political leaders seem increasingly hungry for personal accolades and triumphant power, skirting the hard and humbling work of democracy, there is a wide-open landscape for those humans who want to do some good. And who is in a better position than the current pope, who is humble, financially savvy, and English-speaking? Fr. Buckley’s argument for primus inter pares reminds us that ecclesiological models can easily backfire, and yet I remain hopeful that the “Servant of the Servants of God” can wield his public authority for the global good.
Let me end with just two comments, stemming from two observations about the nature of the papacy. The first has to do with the new pope’s name, Leo XIV. There is a correct connection made with Pope Leo XIII of Rerum Novarum, the social bull from 1891 that had so much to say about the rights of the working class. This link may bode well for his ideas about democracy and the dignity of work. But what is less known, and recently pointed out by my Dutch church historical colleague and Vatican-watcher Peter Nissen, is that there was also a Leo XII (1823–1829), who was the last Augustinian in the job. There was also another Leo XIV, an illegal one, Oscar Michaelli, who ruled for two years (2006–2008) in the tradition of sedevacantism, the theory that since Pope Pius XII the see of Rome is vacant due to heresy. Not unlike how Pope John XXIII undid another Catholic leader who had chosen the name of John XXIII (1409–1418), the current pope strongly continues and subtly preserves the tradition of Catholicism. It is important to keep that tradition whole and unbroken, removing its stains, in order to present a sign of firm hope to the world. My second observation stems from my experience as a medievalist. I have long told my students that it is my conviction that the pope in modernity is more powerful than he was in the Middle Ages. Think of the modes of communication, the world-wide visibility and political standing that popes have today and couldn’t have in the Middle Ages. Nominating an English-speaking pope may be a recognition of this new tradition. While I am aware that this is only an opinion, and do not want to play down the world’s growing secularity, I still stand by my conviction, and am eager to see how this new pope makes use of his worldly power.
This text was originally published on May 29, 2025 on „Sightings“, the blog of the Martin Marty Center (University of Chicago Divinity School) . We thank the Center and the author for the permission to republish it here.
Photocredits: (C) Wikimedia Commons
RaT-Blog Nr. 17/2025