What Pope Leo XIV’s history can tell us about his papacy

Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Prevost, is the first American pontiff.

He was elected on Thursday, less than three weeks after the death of Pope Francis, and his elevation immediately made history. Leo grew up in Chicago, majored in math at Villanova University, and spent decades serving the Catholic Church in Peru.

Significantly, Pope Leo is also the first pontiff to hail from the Augustinian order, which was founded in 1244.

The Augustinians are a mendicant order, which means they rely largely on charitable donations for their needs. They prioritize community and missionary work, with a special emphasis on serving the poor and the weak.

Those beliefs may have influenced Leo’s decision, while he was still a cardinal, to share critiques of the Trump administration online, particularly on issues of immigration — which puts him at odds with another prominent American Catholic: Vice President JD Vance.

In a January interview with Fox News, Vance used his faith as a justification for the Trump administration’s America First agenda. “You love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus [on] and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said.

Shortly after that interview, Leo shared a link to a National Catholic Reporter article titled “JD Vance Is Wrong: Jesus Doesn’t Ask Us to Rank Our Love for Others.”

Today, Explained wanted to get to know this new pope and better understand why the conclave selected him. So we called up Terence Sweeney. He’s an assistant teaching professor in the humanities department and honors program at Villanova University — not only the pope’s alma mater (class of ’77) but also the only Augustinian university in the United States.

His conversation with Noel King, edited for length and clarity, is below. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

How surprised were you [by Pope Leo’s selection]?

I was both surprised and not surprised. I’ve been talking about him with friends and students for the past couple of weeks. Yesterday morning, I popped into the office of Father Allen, an Augustinian on campus, and I said, ‘Are we gonna have an Augustinian pope?’ And he said he didn’t think so.

Sure enough, a few hours later, I got a text message from my friend who said, ‘You called it.’

But at the same time, I was very surprised. I was hopeful for him, but he’s an American, and traditionally, that’s seen as, ‘Oh, it won’t happen.’ So I both kind of called it and was totally shocked.

So tell us who he is. Who is Robert Prevost, or Pope Leo XIV?

Prevost is a kid who grew up in Chicago and went to Villanova University. He had met Augustinians as a young man and joined the order just after college. Maybe most notably, [he] then proceeded to spend most of his life as a priest and then a bishop in the missions in Peru. He could have gotten assigned to a nice parish in a wealthier part of the United States, but instead, he went to Peru to be with the poor, to do work there, to do ministry there, and I think that’s in many ways the heart of who he is.

You can think about it like this: I have a pretty cushy spot at Villanova. I have a house. It’s comfortable. To suddenly shift gears to a totally new culture, learning the language fully in a place that maybe doesn’t have as many perks as an American suburban parish might, I think that’s a real sign of wanting to be with those on the margins of global power and economics.

I don’t think we’ve had a pope in centuries who has had this experience of working in the missions. We’ve had pastor popes, scholar popes, diplomat popes. But a pope who spent most of his life in a poor part of a country doing missionary work — I don’t even know if we’ve ever had one.

When Pope Francis died, there was a big conversation about whether the church would pick somebody who was more traditional or who was viewed as more progressive, the way Pope Francis was. What kind of choice is Pope Leo XIV? Where does he fall on that spectrum?

In some ways, like Pope Francis, he kind of throws us off of these spectrums.

He took the name Leo, which is a pretty traditional papal name. He’s the 14th, right? He’s not the first. He’s closely identifying with both the first Pope Leo, Pope Saint Leo the Great, and Pope Leo XIII, who are richly part of the tradition. Leo XIII is notable for his work on something called Catholic social thought: what the church brings to the questions of economics and justice and politics. And that has tended to be something that what we call progressive Catholics have really centered on.

I think it was also notable that the language of his first address to the people in St. Peter’s Square was richly tied in with Pope Francis: He talked about bridge-building and peace being with all of you. And I think there are some signs that he wants to carry on a lot of what Pope Francis did, but maybe make more connections, we might say, between the kind of Pope Francis side of the church and the Pope Benedict side.

You’ve mentioned several times that he is an Augustinian. What is an Augustinian, exactly?

The Augustinians are a group of friars. They were founded in 1244, and they’re grounded in three principles: living in community, a really strong sense that wherever we go, we go together. [A] deep sense of the heart. If you ever see an icon of St. Augustine, he’s often holding a heart. [That symbolizes] the sense that what we need to do is make connections with other people in their hearts. And a really strong call to the mission to go out. The original Augustinians often went into cities and various places to be with people where they were.

After Robert Prevost was chosen yesterday, immediately it came to the surface that he had expressed some opinions on immigration. I saw people — and you had written about this in the past — drawing a line between the Augustinian tradition and the current controversies that the United States is facing over immigration. What is the Augustinian position on immigration?

Fundamentally, one of the most important parts of being an Augustinian is sometimes called the order of loves. It’s this idea that our hearts need to grow. Our hearts can get very narrow. We can fall in love only with ourselves. So we need to find a way to have our hearts expand to make room for God, who is infinite. When you make room for God, you make room for everyone, particularly for those in need. One of the big tasks of his pontificate for Americans — for all kinds of Catholics, all kinds of people — is helping us broaden our hearts.

Notably, we have a vice president who’s Catholic. JD Vance has spoken about the order of loves. You can think about what he said as having a lot of the right words, but getting the tune wrong. He described one of the very important ideas that the order of loves teaches us: that we rightly prioritize people who are closer to us. He’s emphasizing that and saying: Americans rightly prioritize Americans. But he’s missing the point of the order of loves, that [the heart] was supposed to expand, to go outward. Whereas Vance seems to be talking about it as a way of retracting and going inward.

Pope Francis challenged him on this. Then Prevost retweeted an article in America magazine about challenging Vance on this. That’s an early indication that he, as pope, is going to very much stand with a broadening of our loves.

It is very 2025 for a new pope to be retweeting criticism of a vice president. What do you think it tells us about Pope Leo XIV?

I think that he sees his office as a bishop, and now as bishop of Rome, as a prophetic one. He has a task of prophetic witness. That prophetic witness is going to speak about a lot of things. He is going to speak about the environment. He will definitely speak about immigration. He is going to speak about abortion. He is going to speak about a number of things that are going to throw American binaries off.

We have to keep in mind that he’s a profoundly pro-refugee and pro-life pope, and something I share with him, the sense that the love that we broaden out is meant to go particularly to the smallest and the most forgotten. And I think he sees that, and I think he’s going to speak in that prophetic witness as did the popes before him.