Title: New Pope, New Era for Catholics

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. They now call him Pope Leo. His friends call him Bob. He's now the major figure in a global religion. In college, he was a major in math at Villanova. He comes from Chicago and admits to being a White Sox fan. Maybe that proves he's really for the downtrodden. The White Sox last year became the first team in baseball history to lose 121 games, officially the worst team ever.

You all know the farmer, Robert Prevost. Now, Pope Leo XIV is the first American pope. Politico has an article, "Leo Is America's First Pope. His Worldview Appears at Odds With 'America First.'" Steve Bannon called Leo the "worst pick for MAGA Catholics." That's a quote in that Politico article. Relevant to that, perhaps, here's a clip of Bishop Robert Barron from Minnesota, who just last week got appointed by President Trump to Trump's Commission on Religious Liberty, on what it might say about the condition of this country if there's an American pope.

Bishop Robert Barron: Well, Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said, "Look, until America goes into political decline, there won't be an American pope."

Brian Lehrer: Whoa. Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota. Now, he said that before Pope Leo was announced. I wonder if he would have said it out loud if he thought they might actually pick an American pope. For the record, though, we should say the new pope's record on women in the church and LGBTQ issues is not all that progressive. We'll get into that, too. We'll talk to two guests in just a minute.

I also want to open up the phones right away. One local contribution we can make to the coverage is to see if anyone listening knows Pope Leo XIV personally. Hello, Philadelphia. Any Villanova alum who went to school with him, Class of '77, who might be listening, call in and say if you ever thought your math major buddy would wind up as Pope someday. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone else who might have met him along the way in your life in this country or in Peru.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, and I'll emphasize a little bit. In addition to Americans, anyone with ties to Peru, with a past impression of him, very much invited to call in. If you haven't heard this yet, the pope is a dual citizen of the US and Peru, and he has spent considerable time there. Probably no accident, right? That they chose a pope with a foot in the US and one in Latin America right at this time.

Anyone else, for the moment, with a story of any past contact with or influence of Cardinal Robert Prevost, Bishop Robert Prevost, Father Robert Prevost, long-suffering White Sox fan Robert Prevost, or anything else? We'll see if we get any calls like that, and then later we'll invite any question or comment from anybody, but for now, any story of knowing him or meeting him or having an impression of him from before.

212-433-WNYC. Hello, Chicago. 212-433-9692. Joining me for this are from here in New York, Molly Wilson O'Reilly, columnist and editor-at-large at the Catholic-oriented magazine Commonweal and and live from Rome via the Bronx, David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. He's also author of the very relevant books, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World, and The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism. He also has a New York Times op-ed on Pope Leo today. Molly Wilson O'Reilly, David Gibson, thanks very much for coming on at this historic moment. Welcome to WNYC.

David Gibson: Great to be here.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Molly, I'm guessing you're surprised by this. As the Conclave was taking place, you wrote an article that I saw that said, "For those hoping for the first American pontiff, think of the view from Rome. If you were choosing someone to run a global organization headquartered in Europe in 2025, would you want to put an American in charge?" How does this selection land with you? Of course, this isn't to run NATO, but how does this election land with you, in the context of that question?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: I am surprised. Someone had asked me along the way, "Are there really any Americans that have a shot?" I said, and I wish I had put this in writing so I could prove it. I said, "The only serious candidate I see is this Cardinal Prevost." I also said, "But I don't think that's likely." I said that precisely because he seems he is American by birth. He was brought up in America, but I don't see him as "an American bishop."

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Because he spent most of his life ministering outside the US, he became a bishop not in the United States, but in Peru, and that was the diocese where he spent his ministry. He's not very well known in the US. He's not a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He's not someone that was really on my radar at all until they started talking about this. I do think his Americanness was a factor. I like the way that-- was it Politico that put it that he's the first American pope, but not an America First pope?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: I think Francis saw him. I recently saw an interview with Cardinal Prevost where he said that he was chosen to be in charge of the Dicastery for Bishops in the Vatican, which is the office that hires and fires bishops and elevates people to be bishops all around the world. He said Francis didn't want someone from inside the Roman Curia, someone who already worked at the Vatican. He wanted someone who had a missionary perspective, a global perspective, a Latin American perspective, and that was Prevost for him, so I think--

[00:06:28] Brian Lehrer: Prevost, in that role, wound up picking a lot of the cardinals along the way during Pope Francis's reign, who then wound up picking him yesterday.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: That's true. He's only been in that role since 2023, but yes, he definitely has. He's someone that knows all of them well and someone they know well, so if his Americanness was a factor for them, I think maybe they do see him as someone who will be shrewd about the challenge that America's global power poses for the church and for the world right now.

Brian Lehrer: Right at this moment. David Gibson, we played the clip of Bishop Robert Barron speaking before this election was announced, but saying no American pope would be likely until the US is seen as in political decline. Do you think that's part of what the Conclave was saying to America and the world with this pick?

David Gibson: Yes, it could be, I think, contrary to what Bishop Barron is saying, or maybe in fulfillment of that prophecy, that they see America, the global landscape is shifting, and that's very clear here. In Rome, they're very wary of what's going on. America's kind of seen as a loose cannon, but not also not the same juggernaut single superpower that it was before, so in a sense, picking an American pope again, an American pope, but also a Latin American pope, he was acclaimed the first Peruvian bishop by the Peruvian Bishops Conference.

Picking him at this time in America's history could almost be a sign of how the rest of the world views America's stature in the world, perhaps as declining or at least very unpredictable.

[00:08:18] Brian Lehrer: Here's a little more of that Bishop Baron clip, and I should say these come from a CBS News interview right after he said there won't be an American pope until the US is seen as in political decline. He went on.

Bishop Robert Barron: His point was if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don't want America running the world religiously. I think there's some truth to that, that we're such a superpower and so dominant, they don't want to give us, also, control over the church.

Brian Lehrer: David, a reaction to that? Because I've heard other commentary that has said the reason there's been a reluctance to have an American pope until now is because the United States was just too powerful. Does that sound right to you?

David Gibson: Yes, very much so. You look back to when Pope John Paul II, for example, the first Polish pope, first non-Italian in 450 years, elected in 1978, and he was a great moral leader, obviously did so much to help bring down the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, but he had Ronald Reagan and the United States at his side, really as working in partnership almost. Now, I really see the papacy as a more singular moral voice standing out there.

The world sees America as part of the whole global populist nationalist wave that is sweeping many countries, so in a sense, the America that Bishop Barron described is not the America that the world, at least seen from the Vatican and seen from the perspective of these cardinals. You have to realize these 133 cardinals, 10 of them are Americans, but the rest are from all around the world.

They see, we talk about the USAID cuts, for example, as a terrible, but also as a real constitutional problem, et cetera. For them, it's a matter of life and death. When that money goes away in Africa and Asia, and Latin America, their people die, and that's what they see.

Brian Lehrer: Those reports are coming in. Molly, anything you want to say to bounce off anything David was just saying, or those clips of Bishop Barron?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Yes. I think America, under Trump, has really abandoned the notion of being a world leader, of demonstrating leadership in all of those areas, and it has become much more about dominance, and that is something that I would imagine that the cardinals see the need to push back against. Prevost, or Pope Leo, does not represent American leadership.

I think he, for them, represents someone who can understand the American point of view, but more importantly, understands what it looks like outside of America to the rest of the world.

David Gibson: If I could just say, I think some of the cardinals, several of the cardinals we've been speaking to before they went into the Conclave, they were a lot chattier during the run-up to this Conclave than they were in 2013, but they mentioned Donald Trump. I don't want to overplay that there are a lot of other factors which we can talk about which went, I believe, into Cardinal Prevost's election as Leo, but the name Trump was on their lips, and they see that as a danger, so that did go into factor into the electoral equation.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Interesting, and I guess interesting that people in Rome in those positions were saying that out loud. I will say to our listeners that, as it turns out, we're not getting any personal stories of people who have known Bishop Robert Prevost before he became Pope Leo XIV, so now we'll open it up wider for anyone. Still stories, welcome if you have one, or any question or comment about Pope Leo, as we open it up wider to anybody now.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text with David Gibson from Fordham and Molly Wilson O'Reilly from Commonweal. 212-433-9692. Molly, you also wrote in your article during the Conclave that the American view of liberal and conservative, as we talk about Trump's role here, but the American view of liberal and conservative, already an awkward fit for American Catholics, is a truly inadequate framework for understanding the priorities and divisions of the Catholic hierarchy in the Vatican. How would you describe what the divisions in the Vatican hierarchy actually are, and how you see the naming of this pope in that context?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Well, I don't have a great view of what the people in the hierarchy think, but I do know that what we see as conservative and liberal is very coded by the two parties and their historical positions, and of course, they don't have that framework, but in terms of what conservative means with a small C, to be respectful of the church's traditional teaching, a name like Leo XIV is hearkening all the way back at the earliest to Pope Leo XIII, who died, I think, in 1906 and who established very subtlety church teaching on labor and the rights of labor, the rights of workers, as well as a concern for social teaching and the church's responsibility to kind of lecture governments on what they owe to their people.

It's conservative to want to make sure that we're staying true to that, even though in America politically, that at the moment doesn't seem like something that people who call themselves conservatives want to see the government or the church emphasizing.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, David, you're there in Rome. What's the buzz there on why he picked this name, Leo? As Molly was just saying, there hasn't been-- This is Leo XIV, but Leo XIII was way back in the 1870s to just after the turn of the 20th century.

David Gibson: Yes. Again, he's known as the father of Catholic social teaching, which Catholic social teaching was something that goes back to the Gospels and Matthew, and taking care of the poor and all that, but his encyclical 1891 Rerum Novarum, "On New Things," really response to the Industrial Revolution on behalf of the working class, really set in motion what we consider modern Catholic social teaching.

It's also called the best-kept secret in the Catholic Church. It really wasn't until Pope Francis came out with his strong, powerful constant appeals about economic inequality, economic injustice, care for the poor, care for the migrant, all of the vulnerable, and I think that's really what shocked American sensibilities. Catholic social teaching was, in a way, the best-kept secret because it was obscured by the quite intense focus on Catholic sexual teaching, on contraception, on gay marriage, all of those hot-button issues, also fueled by America's culture wars.

Francis, really, again, he very deliberately and explicitly said, "We can't focus on those teachings to the exclusion of everything else. Everybody knows what we teach on that. What about the landlord who's cheating his tenant, the boss who's cheating his worker out of his wages?" He said, "Why do we always focus on the below-the-belt issues?" He put it that way in his typically colorful way of saying things. To have Prevost take the name Leo, I think, indicates very strongly that he wants to continue that focus on social justice issues, which some are just going to call him a woke Pope, but that's basically the gospel as far as the Catholic Church sees it.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Kelly on Long Island, who has something close to a story of personal contact with Bishop Robert Prevost before he became Pope Leo. Hi, Kelly, thanks for calling in.

Kelly: Hi, yes. I was just calling in about we discovered yesterday my oldest sister, she graduated from Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, in 2005, and at that time, Pope Leo was serving as the Prior General of the Augustinians, and he celebrated Mass at the Merrimack graduation, and he also received an honorary degree in Augustinian education, so my family and I all celebrated mass with him back in 2005.

Brian Lehrer: Did you have any impression of him at that time, or not really?

Kelly: Not really, because I think I was like 12 or 13.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Kelly, thank you very much. Molly, on him being an Augustinian, for people who don't know the significance of that, it was very significant that Pope Francis was the first Jesuit. How about Pope Leo as an Augustinian? What does that signify, or what is that branch of the Catholic Church, for people who don't know?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Well, in my opinion, the bishops that come out of religious orders make the best bishops, so I'm delighted that they've gone this way, but it was very unusual up until Pope Francis for a bishop cardinal who came from a religious order rather than from a diocese to become the pope. The Augustinians, Pope Leo entered formation for the Augustinians when he was a teenager.

It just means that he entered a group of men who wanted to become priests, but also were attracted to a particular charism, they call it, a particular way of understanding the call of Jesus and the working of the Holy Spirit, and the kind of work that they're supposed to do. Augustinians are known in the United States because of Villanova and Merrimack, and some high schools that they founded, and they work all around the world.

Once he completed his formation, he went to Peru, and he was a missionary there, eventually became a bishop there, and he has said that that work was what really shaped him most as a priest and as a person. I understand that involved everything from driving himself around and learning how to fix his truck when it broke down to saying mass and hearing confessions and all of those things. I think that those kinds, that kind of formation for a priest and that kind of experience of being a bishop or a leader of a religious community, which he ultimately was.

He was the Prior General, as the colleague just said, of all the Augustinians worldwide. It is an experience of a kind of collaborative discernment of synodality, like Pope Francis wanted the whole church to learn to do. I think the priests and women who come out of religious communities have that experience and know how to work in that way, and see the church as a global entity instead of just in their local context, so that seems very significant to me.

Brian Lehrer: Now, you also hit a religious hot button. You mentioned the word "synodality," and David, I saw that you wrote in your Times' op-ed, "Many conservatives read into how Francis conceived of synodality, a veritable heresy that sowed confusion and ambiguity among the faithful." Want to explain that word more and expand on why Francis was seen as a heretic for his notion of synodality?

David Gibson: Very much so, yes. It was not popular with a lot of conservatives, and it was a real buzzword here, and of course, it sounds so strange to American ears. It's really a Greek word for walking together. It's just another way of saying a council or an assembly. It's a gathering. It's a consultative way of being the church. It's not something we're familiar with in the United States very much.

It's really ancient, has ancient roots in the church. Local assemblies, synods, councils have been held throughout the centuries. It's kind of been falling by the wayside. It was reinstituted in the 1960s from the Vatican as a Synod of Bishops following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, a Synod of Bishops where bishops would gather every two or three years under the aegis of the pope to discuss a particular issue of concern to the church.

I started covering them when I started working in the Vatican back in the 1980s, and by then, under Pope John Paul II, they'd just become just scripted affairs. Three and a half weeks. Bishops just hated coming to them because they were sitting there. They were told-- Cardinal Bergoglio, Pope Francis, when he remembered, when he was elected, he remembered coming to a synod in 2001. He told the story.

He had an intervention, something he wanted to talk about, and they had to clear all of their speeches with the Vatican with the Curie beforehand, and they told him, "No, you can't say that." At his first synod, he took the synod, and he turned it into really the engine of reform that was behind his entire papacy." He said at his first synod, "Don't ever let anyone say, 'You can't say that.' Anyone can speak their mind.'"

He also significantly turned it not just into a Synod of Bishops who gather, but a synod of young people, a synod with women voting, a synod with nuns. It was just by the end of his pontificate, to come here to see a synod with American college students taking part at the same table with cardinals, having the same boat as bishops, was really extraordinary, but extraordinary. Obviously, I like it. Not everyone else did.

Brian Lehrer: When we come back from a break, we're going to play a clip of then Cardinal Bob Prevost, now Pope Leo, speaking in English in 2023 about being an American in his position. We'll also play a clip of him in Spanish. We're going to take more calls. Tony in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, you're next. I think you've got a very interesting point or question. We're going, too, ask you to react to this text that came in.

Listener writes, "I'm confused about the hope some of the United States have about this pope mitigating the effects of the Trump administration," so I'll ask you if any of this matters, you think potentially, or only symbolic, and for discussions like this and more. Stay with us as we talk about the ascension of Pope Leo. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we talk about Pope Leo XIV with Molly Wilson O'Reilly, columnist and editor-at-large at the Catholic-oriented magazine Commonweal. She's here in New York. Live from Rome, but via the Bronx, David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. He's also the author of very relevant books called The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World, and The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism.

Some of you may have seen just this morning his new New York Times op-ed on Pope Leo today. Here's a clip of Pope Leo in 2023 as Cardinal Bob Prevost on being an American in that position.

Cardinal Bob Prevost: I am American, and I think I do have some insights into the church in the United States, so the need to be able to advise, work with Pope Francis, and to look at the challenges that the church in the United States is facing. I hope to be able to respond to them with a healthy dialogue.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Tony in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, who I think is going to articulate what he sees as one of those challenges to the church in the United States. Hi, Tony. You're on WNYC.

Tony: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking this call. Before I tell you my little two cents, I want to say that this is why we have public radio, and we don't have a choice. We have to fund public radio because without you, we don't get this independent journalism, so everybody's got to give. It's not a choice anymore. That being said, I think [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: How much did we pay you to say that, Tom? No, I'm kidding. That was very nice. Thank you very much.

Tony: I live in Egg Harbor, and I contribute to WNYC.

Brian Lehrer: Aw.

Tony: I'm waiting for your hat, by the way, because I'm going on a trip of Canada, and I want to have my Brian hat with me there.

Brian Lehrer: All right, we got to take his address. If we were supposed to send you a hat, and it was late, we're going to take your address off the air. Yes, let's Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, not Egg Harbor, New Jersey, right?

Tony: No, and it's Door County, Wisconsin, the home of electing the last five presidents, so there you have it. I think it was a business decision that the College of Cardinals elected Pope Louis XIV because the 2025 plan, which was written by evangelicals, I don't know if Catholics had a seat at that table or not, but Catholicism in the United States had lost a lot of bent-knee, church-going Catholics to evangelicals.

I think the College of Cardinals wanted a guy with home-court advantage, and like Carney in Canada, he got elected because of Trump. Susan Crawford, a Supreme Court judge in Wisconsin, got elected because of Trump, but not because it was a vote for Trump; it was a vote against Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Tony, thank you very much. Very provocative. Hang on. Mary, let's make sure we take his address and make sure that hat is on the way. He probably won one in our contest in the last membership drive. David Gibson, let me go to you on this in the context of your book, How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism. What about Tony's theory that one reason for naming an American pope was the competition for Christians with the rising Evangelical Church in America?

David Gibson: Well, I don't know if it was that strategic. I don't know if it was that deliberate, but I think to his point, actually, the head of the Heritage Foundation and author of the 2025 plan, Kevin Roberts, is Catholic, as are so many of the people in the Trump administration, from the spokesperson to all throughout.

Brian Lehrer: J.D. Vance.

David Gibson: J.D. Vance. Bingo. I think Pope Leo is rightly first concerned with his own flock to a degree, and some of their positions and how they've developed. You look, yes, White evangelicals are 80% or more for Trump, for the Republican Party, for the base of the MAGA wing, but White Catholics are getting close behind, about 56% of them, I think it was, voted for Trump, increased from Trump's earlier victory.

The challenge for the church is that the Catholic Church is very diverse. It's a DEI church in so many ways. Perhaps 40% of the church in the United States is Latino, and that's growing, and it's vibrant, so he doesn't want to see a divided church. He wants these portions of the church, these sides of the church, to come together in faith and not be divided by politics as it is now.

Brian Lehrer: Molly, you want to react to that text that I read before the break? Let me pull this up and read it again here. It was longer than the part I read, but the beginning of it was, "I'm confused about the hope some in the United States have about this pope mitigating the effects of the Trump administration." Do you think there's any reason to think that whoever the Pope is has an effect on politics or policy in the United States or anywhere, for that matter?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Well, I don't think the Pope is going to save us. I think that we're going to have to do that ourselves, but I definitely felt in the last months of Pope Francis' life, it was important to feel like there was one sort of major figure on the world stage who seemed to still be concerned about the things that I thought were important and who seemed to see fairly clearly that the rise of authoritarianism in countries, including the United States, was bad and needed to be checked.

If nothing else, having a pope who seems to be in that same mold feels a lot more hopeful to me than having the prospect of potentially having a pope who would be willing to align himself with Trump or with anyone in the Trump mold. Trump, in his sort of crudely transactional way, has tried to claim that the Catholic Church is on his side. "I'm good for the church, so you have to support me," the way he says to any special interest group.

I think that the leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States have done a very bad job of positioning themselves in relationship to that. Having a pope who seems much less inclined to let him get away with that can only help, but I'm not sure that it will save us in any significant way.

Brian Lehrer: David, since you were in Rome for the Conclave, was there any buzz about that Photoshopped picture that Trump posted of himself as a pope? Can you imagine if Obama did that, what the reaction would be around the world? Was there any buzz about that at the Vatican?

David Gibson: Very much so. That was among all the things. I realized after this last couple of weeks, the problem with the movie Conclave is that it wasn't melodramatic enough. [laughter] All the gossip and the rumors and the "Oh, this cardinal fainted. Oh, this cardinal has gambling debts in Macau and casinos in Macau." Literally, but then in the middle of it all, that AI of Pope Trump drops.

I think, to Molly's point, with Trump, you're not going to get any traction, and what really affects him. Also, look, above all, it's the fact that he felt and knew he could do something like that, and frankly, not really suffer any political consequences. What's in it for him to give in to the pope in any way or even be nice about it? Again, this was before the Congress. This was during the mourning period for Pope Francis, while people were in the streets. It was pretty shocking. It really, really landed loudly and badly.

Brian Lehrer: On taking the name Leo, one listener writes, "Don't forget Pope Leo I, who saved Italy from Attila the Hun. May the new Leo save us from the modern Attilas." Hugh in Manhattan is going to take us up to Leo X. Hugh, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Hugh, are you there? Oh, okay. We don't have Hugh, so that's not going to work out. I want to come back to his connections to Peru.

He's an American from Chicago, yes, and he went to college at Villanova, yes. By the way, between the Pope and Jalen Brunson, Villanova is having a moment this week, that's for sure, but the Pope is a dual citizen of the US and Peru. In his opening remarks from the Vatican yesterday, he decided not to speak English at all, just Italian and some words, including these, in Spanish.

Pope Leo XIV: [Spanish language]

Brian Lehrer: That's giving a shoutout to folks back home in Peru. Rough translation. Molly, why is he a dual citizen? Tell us more about his connection to Peru.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: Well, he's been there. He was sent there as a missionary, and he has said that that shaped him as a priest more than anything else he's done, so obviously, his Spanish is fluent, and he developed there the sense that Francis talked about when he was pope, that Francis used to say he wanted his bishops to have the smell of the sheep. If the bishop is the shepherd, he should be someone who is in among his people, knows what their lives are like, shares life with them, rather than someone who rules over them.

My sense of Pope Leo is that he had that same experience, starting out as a missionary and then being elevated to become the bishop of Chiclayo, and I think that's why he sort of switched Spanish and said, "If you'll allow me the indulgence of a few words in Spanish to my beloved diocese." He made the choice not to do that in English. He didn't say, "Shoutout to Chicago."

Although I'm sure he was thinking about his family at home watching. Yes, I think that was definitely a choice. He wanted people to know that he's not speaking from the perspective of an American of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking about Pope Leo, sort of in contrast to MAGA Catholics, a lot in this conversation, but I mentioned in the intro that we should definitely also say the new Pope's record on women in the church and LGBTQ issues is not all that progressive. I'm going to take Ronnie in Martin County, Florida, to give some voice to that. Ronnie, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Ronnie: Thank you. I love your show. You're wonderful. That was the perfect segue. I want pushback from a New York City audience, from your whole audience. How can you support an organization that openly discriminates against women with full immunity? Please, all the people who are supporting the Catholic Church, especially the women, please prove me wrong. I can't support an organization that does not give me equal rights.

Brian Lehrer: Ronnie, thank you. Molly, I'm going to stay with you on this one.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: I definitely experience a lot of that frustration. I can only say that I have also had some of my most profound experiences of women in leadership and women's intellectual gifts and spiritual gifts in the context of the Catholic Church, which I've been part of all my life. In terms of Pope Leo, I don't have any sign that he's going to be much different than any of his predecessors on this.

This is an area where Pope Francis made some real progress, but he was also fairly disappointing. I think he had a pretty chauvinist view, and I think it's what I expect from men who become cardinals in the Catholic Church. I think change on that needs to come up from the bottom, and it's been working its way up extremely slowly.

Brian Lehrer: How do they even justify it at this point that women can't be priests, women can't be the Pope? How do they even justify it? In 2025.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: It all goes-- John Paul II dedicated himself very, very directly to laying groundwork to keep this in place in a moment when it seemed like it could change, when it was changing in a lot of other institutions and churches, and he pointed back to the gender complementarity, as he called it, to the gender binary, this idea that men are men and women are women, and they have their separate gifts and spheres, and because Jesus Christ was a man, only a man can embody the role of Christ in that way.

That theology is not convincing to me. It's not convincing to a lot of people, but it is the theology that most men who are now the leaders of the church were sort of trained to adhere to.

Brian Lehrer: David, there's a quote of him on LGBTQ issues in the New York Times today in one of their profiles. It says, "In a 2012 address to bishops, he lamented that Western news media and popular culture fostered 'sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel' and he cited the 'homosexual lifestyle' and 'alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.'" On LGBTQ acceptance, anything you can say?

David Gibson: No, I think that that's going to be something, a real litmus test as we're going forward. We're just sort of trying to figure out who Leo is. That was Prevost, and that's boilerplate anti-gay language that you'll get from a lot of church leaders, but people grow, people learn. Pope Francis did very much on LGBTQ issues, on a whole range of things, perhaps not as far as he should have or people would like.

Again, Pope Francis was so open to meeting gay people, and he met with trans Catholics once a month, brought to him by a nun who works with them, that kind of thing. What is Pope Leo going to do? Is he going to model that kind of acceptance, if not directly changing church teaching? That remains to be seen. Again, he's going to face the media. He's going to be on papal trips with reporters, and he's going to be asked about that, so I think we need to hear it from him himself.

Brian Lehrer: Somebody texted, Molly, "I just heard a complaint about the new Pope in a BBC interview with a woman representing a sexual abuse organization stating that as a church leader, both in Chicago and in Peru, he acted to protect priests who were accused of being sexual abusers. He doesn't sound like a great choice for this reason, if true," writes that listener. Know anything about that?

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: I don't know the details. I have heard a little about it, but I don't know. I don't know if his record is notably worse than basically every other man in that room because it's an unfortunate truth about where we are in the Catholic Church that anybody who is in leadership now has some kind of connection to some case that was not handled as well as it should have been.

David Gibson: Yes, I think on that, just I would say it's worth-- Look, you got to examine the record. I've reported on abuse for decades, so it's something both Molly and I are committed to fighting. The case in Peru, he was sent there to clean up a very right-wing Sodalicio organization that was accused of abuse, had all kinds of abuses, from sex to money to everything. Pope Francis just finally shut it down just a year ago. It's some members of that organization that have accused him of somehow covering up. I don't think it's a very credible accusation or story, but again, these things all need to be vetted.

Brian Lehrer: Something on the genealogy of this pope that a few people have written or called in about. We're going to have Andre in Bethesda articulate it. Andre, you're on WNYC.

Andre: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Andre: Yes, I'm calling because I noticed, first of all, I'm Franco-American, born in Mexico, so I'm pretty international as well, but I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about an article that I read this morning in the New York Times pointing to the fact that the new pope has Haiti and French ancestry. I don't know if you guys had a chance to see it, but you could look it up on your own.

I find this particularly interesting because the name Prevost, that's how I pronounce it in French, not Prevost, but Prevost is a French name. I was looking up everywhere on the Internet for his genealogy, and I couldn't find anything, except the New York Times did find it. That's all I want to say.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Yes, here's a quote from that Times article that he was descended from "creole people of color from New Orleans," David.

David Gibson: Yes, he represents the American experience in so many ways and Chicago in so many ways. His family's never identified as Black, but he's got a remarkably diverse, truly melting-pot background, and I think that just all plays into the portrait of him as someone who's a very cosmopolitan person, and at the same time, is quintessentially American.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking appropriately about some very serious domestic and global issues in relation to the naming of this pope, but we're going to end on a lighter note with Beth on the Lower East Side and something that she's apparently praying for right now with all these Villanova grads in the news. Beth, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Beth: Hi, Brian. Thank you. I'm on my knees, and three of the major players on the Knicks are Villanova graduates, so I am hoping for some divine intervention in the NBA playoffs and final. Let's go, Knicks.

Brian Lehrer: From Pope Leo, who, by the way, Molly, majored in math at Villanova. That's not everybody's conception of the route to the papacy.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly: No, but he was already being in formation with the Augustinians, so perhaps that was their idea. Maybe they thought a math degree might be a useful thing to have in the house.

Brian Lehrer: Molly Wilson, O'Reilly, columnist and editor-at-large at the Catholic-oriented magazine Commonweal, and David Gibson, director of the center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, author of a New York Times op-ed on Pope Leo today and the books The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism and The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World. Thank you so much for giving us your time today.

Molly Wilson O'Reilly and David Gibson: Thank you.

 

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