Nate Tinner-Williams, a contributing Globe Opinion writer, is cofounder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
As the excitement in Rome dies down after the first week of Pope Leo XIV, I am left marveling at how well he represents the millions he now leads.
We now have our first American pope, much like his successor in his message and mission, embracing the least among us and encouraging new exploration of Catholic faith in the modern age. He is also the first new pope I have experienced personally, given my conversion in 2019.
He is not a Black pope, though he has African-tinged Creole ancestry in Louisiana. He is also not simply a “pope for America,” having identified strongly with Latin America as well, where he spent nearly half of his ministerial career.
He appears to be the first pope who was already a man of the digital age, having maintained an active social media presence before his election — where he did not shy away from political, social, and robust religious commentary. He was no influencer, to be sure, but insofar as Francis was a pope who became known to most people when he became pope, Leo is someone many already knew.
He is a bishop of two worlds, that of the Global North and the Global South. His deeply American sensibilities as a Chicago native have long since met with his pastoral oeuvre as a missionary Augustinian priest in Peru. In the former, the young Robert Prevost was an unremarkable Catholic child, protected by faith and family while nurturing a vocation to the priesthood. In the latter, he lived under the conservative Fujimori regime and spoke out against its violence, as well as that of the far-left Shining Path insurgency.
In these ways and others, Prevost was a man somewhere in the middle.
This ambiguity apparently extends to Leo’s own family background. Though he recently described his grandparents as “all immigrants,” within hours of his first appearance as pope in St. Peter’s Square it was revealed that his maternal grandmother was born in America and had deep New Orleans roots.
He is perhaps the first pope in modern history about whom there is uncertainty on the question: “Where are your people from?”
And yes, isn’t it all too American to know — or embrace — so little about your own roots? We are not generally moored in centuries of ancestral culture. We mostly do not remember the languages of our grandparents and great-grandparents, and many do not even know their names. We do not build altars to their memory, and we are principally defined not by who they were but by who we wish to become.
It brings to mind the story of the first Black American Catholic prelate, who was in fact half white. The mixed-race Boston priest James A. Healy, the son of a plantation owner and an enslaved woman, set aside his past and, fully empowered by the church to live as anything but African, rose to great heights as bishop of Portland, Maine, 150 years ago. His siblings, too, “passed” their way to greatness in the church.
As quintessential Americans, they were — we are — ultimately the products of a “melting pot” that created something unlike its components.
Enter the “American pope,” chosen by a globally diverse College of Cardinals. Their own variegation has brought us to a moment radically unforeseen by the watchers and thinkers of the age. It was time for an African pope. An Asian. Another Italian. No, indeed, the College of Cardinals that Francis built could only birth something global. Something ambiguous but concretely proclamatory.
After the fact, the cardinals called it “unity.” Prevost was the man who could continue the Pope Francis legacy, represent the oneness that is Catholicism, and bring together disparate parts in a church whose global growth is greatest among those on the margins of society.
So what does Pope Leo XIV represent for the people? A man of their own. Who can hesitate to claim him? He is many things at once. A Vaticano and a newcomer. A pastor and a prelate. An American and a Latino. An immigrant and a Creole. A white man and, somehow, a person of color.
Expectations are sky-high, and all eyes are on the pope, in livestreams and streams of consciousness, in a way previous generations could never imagine. The world is waiting to see who exactly he will be, for whom, and with what perspective.
It’s far too early to tell, but I think he will be just what we need: Someone who is hard to pin down.