We’ve had a new pope for exactly two weeks now and from comments I am seeing online, some are elated while others are positively dismayed by the choice of Robert Cardinal Prevost as the new Vicar of Christ. My first reaction was a rather personal one ~ for the first time in my life there is a pope sitting on the throne of St. Peter who is younger than I am! That in itself is a lot to digest. Popes were supposed to be old guys and suddenly this “youngster” (to me) is prancing around in the white robes and skullcap of the Petrine office. It feels like that moment when you meet your new doctor for the first time and you realize, “He looks like a teenager!”

But now that I have overcome the initial unsettling wave of chronological dysphoria, I am ready take a more balanced, objective view of the situation. Leo XIV is not only the first pope younger than myself but he is also the first American pope, Chicago born and bred, something that was considered unthinkable even a year ago. The cardinals in conclave were willing to pursue this pragmatic option in my opinion because the scandal plagued Vatican finances are in such a disheveled state that they needed someone able to tap more easily into our vast national wealth. That is not a criticism but merely an observation. Fiscally, the Vatican has its back to the wall, a problem which the Bergoglian papacy only exacerbated by purposely alienating American Catholics, who also happen to be the Vatican’s largest donor class. The hope is that Leo, as an American, can right the ship.

From the moment he first appeared on the Loggia wearing the traditional papal robes of office Leo appeared to be a conciliator. But what most struck many was his choice in taking the name Leo XIV, a clear sign that he envisions a dramatic change in direction for the Church after 12 chaotic years of “Francis the agitator.” This Leo’s predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, likewise stepped into a supercharged time of crisis for the Church back in 1878, as it came under full frontal assault by Freemasonry. The Industrial Revolution was raging like a wildfire upending Christian civilization wherever it laid down smoke belching factories and massive urban slums. Leo responded with his great encyclical Rerum Novarum which afforded dignity to the workers yet defended the rights of property, threading a common sense course between the excesses of unrestrained corporate capitalism and the equally soul deadening mosh pit of Marxist socialism.