This pope speaks American…the world listens

Papal top 10. And a bestseller about the pontiff from an unlikely country

Pope Leo XIV’s first Popemobile ride during his inauguration. Image: US Department of State. Public Domain

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The Big Story:

Leo XIV wrapped up an 11-day tour of Africa, including the first visit by a pontiff to Muslim Algeria, with a question trailing him: Is the Chicago-born pope now the most prominent American voice of moral authority?

• Pope Leo has spoken out against the US-Israel war on Iran, the Trump administration’s harsh immigration crackdown and the rush to embrace artificial intelligence, which could threaten human beings’ relationship with the truth and with each other.
• Throughout history, some popes have gone beyond the traditional remit of leading the Catholic church to playing a temporal role in diagnosing the world’s afflictions and ministering to them.

This Week’s Books:

• A leading historian picks 10 popes over two millennia.
• A bestseller on a new pope with an idealistic agenda.

Another relevant free-to-read post:

[embed]Why is the Pope in Mongolia? Hope, mercy and murders in Ulaanbaatarthisweekthosebooks.substack.com

Ten Popes Who Shook the World

By: Eamon Duffy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Year: 2011

The author, a professor of the history of Christianity, has picked 10 of the most influential popes from the over-260 who have led the Catholic church in 2,000 years.

Eamon Duffy’s top 10 are not the most pious or the best popes, but the ones who oversaw massive change in the church and the world.

The list includes St Peter, the first pope; Leo the Great, who stopped Attila the Hun from sacking Rome; John XXIII, who called the 1962 Second Vatican Council that made sweeping changes to the church (such as use of the vernacular in the liturgy) and John Paul II. The first Polish pope, John Paul II helped create peaceful resistance to Soviet control of eastern Europe, mediated in conflicts in Africa and South America and became the first pontiff to visit a synagogue and a mosque. Duffy says of John Paul II: “He was the greatest man to occupy the Chair of Peter for centuries, and one of the greatest ever. His personal history recapitulated the tormented history of the twentieth century, and he brought to bear on that history an unfailingly honest vision and indomitable courage”.

One of Duffy’s picks is Pope Pius XII, who controversially maintained a strict silence about the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.

The book identifies Gregory the Great’s sixth century tenure as the moment the papacy began to exercise secular authority with a charitable focus. But it would take another 500 years for the papacy to free itself from state control. In declaring “that the Roman pontiff alone can depose and reinstate bishops”, Gregory VII (1073–85) confirmed the pope’s independent embodiment of secular and spiritual authority.

While this book shows the papacy as so much bigger than any one individual, it also underlines a basic truth: A pope is influential or not because of who he is, personally.

It’s too early in Leo’s 11 months in the job to say if he would make the cut as a world-shaking pope.

The Shoes of the Fisherman

By: Morris L West

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Year: 1963

This bestseller, whose main protagonist is the relatively young Pope Kiril Lakota of Ukraine, is seen as prophetic. It was written some 15 years before John Paul II became the first pope from behind the Iron Curtain!

The plot revolves around Cold War era tensions and how the new Pope Kiril has to tread carefully between idealism and realpolitik. He chooses to be bold and determined on renewal because the church’s “real battleground” lies in “the secret landscape of the individual spirit”.

The author, who once served as Vatican correspondent for the British tabloid the Daily Mail, recreates the election of the pope and the rhythms of the Vatican with granular detail similar to Robert Harris’ The Conclave.

Like The Conclave, The Shoes of the Fisherman became a film with some of the biggest stars of the day.

The fisherman of the title is St Peter, who was a fisherman before he became the first pope.

Choice quotes:

Age was a bar to some [papal hopefuls]. Talent or temperament or reputation was an impediment to others. Nationality was a vital question. One could not elect an American without seeming to divide East and West even further. A Negro Pope might seem a spectacular symbol of the new revolutionary nations, just as a Japanese might be a useful link between Asia and Europe. But the princes of the Church were old men and as wary of spectacular gestures as they were of historic hangovers. A German Pope might alienate the sympathies of those who had suffered in World War II. A Frenchman would recall old memories of Avignon and tramontane rebellions.

*“In America? Two reasons: prosperity and respectability. We’re not persecuted any more. We pay our way. We can wear the faith like a Rotary badge — and with as little social consequence. We collect our dues like a club, shout down the Communists, and make the biggest contribution in the whole world to Peter’s Pence…”*– Charles Corbet Carlin, cardinal archbishop of New York, on why the church is losing its grip

The Back Story:

• US President Donald Trump has publicly attacked Pope Leo¹ for being too “liberal”.
• Father Antonio Spadaro of the Vatican’s Dicastery (department) for Culture and Education, says that Leo, the first American pope, offers “a counter-narrative”² to MAGA’s Christian nationalism. Spadaro has said: “He [Leo] is implicitly recalling another America. It’s the America that, in its better moments, was a moral force in the world”.

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² Spadaro, Antonio. Trump has turned the pope into an adversary — and exposed himself. Pearls and Irritations, April 17, 2026. https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/04/trump-has-turned-the-pope-into-an-adversary-and-exposed-himself/