The world was stunned in May when following white smoke, the name Robert Prevost was echoed whisperingly around the web, including by the odd Catholic Cardinal.

“I’m still trying to figure it out” Cardinal Timothy Dolan told the Today show in his native New York. “I wish I could tell you we were on the same baseball team in grade school…but I really didn’t know him but when I got here in Rome, I would hear his name…and I think this was to his advantage that we didn’t identify him with any one trend or style, and that they didn’t really know he was from the United States…A citizen of the world”.

Christ, in appearing after his resurrection to some of his disciples on the road to Emmaus is famously unrecognized by them and treated as a curious stranger on the road, one who seems to know so much of wisdom. Likewise, when he began his ministry aged 30, the people who heard his surgical sermons asked themselves “Indeed, who is this man, and where does he come from?”

Echoing the famous answer to that query about Galilee found in Scripture, yet another Bishop quipped this week: “But surely, nothing good ever comes out of Chicago!”

1. Woke?

For Robert Prevost, as now most of us undoubtedly know, was brought up on those streets; of a city whose University is famous for contrasts in both its in-depth analysis of social strata and justice in its Department of Sociology, as well as the neoclassical “School of Economics” of Milton Friedman who informed so much of modern monetary policy; Chicago, whose state votes red while its city strongly blue.

Treating the Papacy as if it were some species of presidential election showdown between Democrat and Republican Catholics, Fox News and CNN jumped into reporting frenzy at a moment’s notice.

“Is this a woke pope?” blurted the headlines.

Initially without any background of who on earth Leo XIV was, aspersions began to be cast about the favour he found under Pope Francis, then-Cardinal Prevost’s now famous rebuke last year of JD Vance’s theology justifying controlled immigration and his emphasis in his opening remarks on the modern church which under him would “continue to be synodal”, a religion founded in dialogue between everyday Catholics and the clergy about how it ought to function in 2025.

The evidence seemed to be in. Could Robert Prevost, the Bishop-Elector picked by Francis, a pope famous for his rejection of what he saw as “trappings” – the popemobile, the palatial suite, the $32,000 monthly stipend – look to follow in his footsteps embracing open immigration, quietly discouraging the surge of predominantly young, Traditionalist Catholics reclaiming the Latin Mass, and blessing same-sex attracted Catholics along with their partners with a formal prayer of the church?

Still more conservative talking heads in America bemoaned the new Pope’s refusal to use English in his opening remarks.

“You’d think being the first American Pope we might have heard from him in his native tongue” one Fox News Host pouted.

Pope Leo, by contrast, chose to address the adoring masses of St Peters Square in Italian, Latin and – to resounding applause of the Latin Americans present – Spanish to honour his diocese of Chiclayo, Peru where he spent most of his adult life, and allegedly never owned a car, choosing instead to ride on horseback to serve the rural, mountain communities first as missionary priest and later, as their bishop.

Saturday Night Live, though, simply weren’t buying it and said as much in a razor-sharp piece last weekend: “I love that conservatives are already complaining that this pope is too woke…how woke could a 69-year-old man from Chicago be?” joked Colin Jost. “It’s not like he came out and was like Hey I’m Pope Leo the fourteenth, he/him…”

Then, as the audience fell about in laughter, the comedian rammed his point home, causing my eyebrows to just about float off the top of my forehead: “Honestly, if you’re a woke Catholic, you’re probably just…not Catholic anymore”

“Amen” I muttered, just about crossing myself in surprise.

For her part, Sunny Hostin at The View eventually managed to press the brakes on pope mania, somewhat nervously digging up a quote from Prevost to an audience of bishops, lamenting how popular culture seemed to not just tolerate but promote “alternative models of family” citing those comprised of same sex partners and their adopted children. Prevost had also previously expressed concern about the promotion of gender ideology as “confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist”.

“I just hope” said Sunny, who I was pleased to learn is a ‘devout Catholic’, “that this pope doesn’t roll back the [great] changes [made by Pope Francis]”. Her co-host, Ana Navarro urged Hostin “to wait and to pray”, citing the politicians (like Barack Obama) who used to be against gay marriage for political reasons but who eventually came into the fold. The hosts of the View certainly seemed to be encouraged a week later when they learned about Prevost’s Haitian roots, with Hostin claiming she “loved” that “we have a black Pope”.

Watching the clips, I found empathy for Hostin along with every other onlooker – of which there were unprecedented millions – viewing Pope Francis’ funeral, googling how to become Catholic (up nearly 400% between 20 and 26 April), and in the wake of white smoke billowing from the Vatican’s chimneys, scouring the web for clues as to the kind of person and Pope Prevost would be for the world.

2. Family

That secular, agnostic and Christian onlookers among them were anxiously waiting to see if Leo XIV “hated the gays” is hardly a surprise given the ambiguous pathway Pope Francis took in his sometimes-confusing but deeply loving “Who am I to judge?” approach and his blessing of same sex unions, not intended as an affirmation of the marriage, but rather as a prayer for both parties…together.

For any progressive or middle-of-the-road libertarian, the image of “God Hates Fags” emblazoned onto placards held by members of the Westboro Baptist Church picketing soldiers’ funerals is understandably projected onto any Christian, even Catholics who are often seen as default bigots, guilty until proven innocent.

“If that’s the way the message was coming out, then we were disordered” YouTube evangelist Bishop Barron (who grew up in a neighbouring suburb to the Pope in Chicago) said recently in a thoughtful interview with Dave Rubin. “If the only thing a gay person hears from the church is ‘you’re intrinsically disordered’ then we’ve got a very serious problem on our hands. The message to a gay person should be ‘you are a beloved child of God…and invited to a full share of the divine life. There’s message number one.”

All of us – myself included – married, single, gay, Christian, straight, atheist, trans: there are a hundred ways for us to fall short of the bar the Catholic Church sets: that sex ought to be enjoyed for intimacy and procreation. How we justify setting such a high bar is by reminding the world of God’s invitation for radical, reconciling and transforming love; something many Christians – like the Pharisees before them – have been rather piss-poor at, condemning the LGBTQi+ community while neglecting to call out the Christians and “straight” crowd cheapening the sacrament Christ gave us in marriage as a sampling of his perfect generative love, and invitation for us to co-create with Him; divine office where masculine and feminine, heaven and earth, principle and principled literally come together to birth creation.

Pope Leo, for his part has sought not to condemn the various groups hoping to one day be included in Catholic social teaching but to uphold and support the one unit society seems determined to edge out of the spotlight: The traditional family, where both mum and dad can feel financially, psychologically and spiritually supported to bring healthy children into the world, to maintain the numbers we need; The numbers which – especially in the West where we so tirelessly promote exceptions to the rule – are will soon begin to drop significantly.

3. Worker

And so why “Leo”; why “the lion”?

The first leonine Pope was so “great” they actually popped it into his title (not all popes are remembered as such!), most noted for meeting with and convincing Attila the Hun not to invade Italy in 452 (aided by the Hun’s alleged vision of Saints Peter and Paul threatening him with swords), as well as a series of ecumenical councils he supported to establish the exact nature of Christ’s full divinity and humanity, a ruling whose philosophical implications for the dignity of the human person/body and mystical destiny to become divine through Christ cannot be overstated.

The most recent Leo (XIII) was similarly a tireless servant who strove to protect workers rights to safe and reasonably paid work, establish unions and promote justice for the marginalized. His New Testament economics and revolutionary roar were a blow to the industrialists of the 19th century, rebuking both atheistic communism and laissez faire capitalism as inhumane, and earning him the moniker “Pope of The Workers”.

And so, it seems, will such lionlike strength be required of this Leo.

In the age of AI automation, with humanity sat upon the precipice of what can sometimes feel like species-wide redundancy, will Leo XIV be ready to do his bit in taming a few runaway industries himself? In the name of the human worker, who the Pope sees not as a competitor for the planet’s limited resources, nor a pawn to move about on a board “for his own good”, but the very image of God, might his approach differ from the Bill Gates and Klaus Schwabs of the world, so intent on reducing the population at the expense of previously unquestioned rights to freedom and decency?

All the coding knowledge or venture capital in the world could not buy our elites in Silicon Valley the timeless insight and prerogative imago Dei gives us in this brave new world: to leave no human person behind.

Cardinal Chomali actually asked Pope Leo about his choice of name over a meal, so we didn’t have to:

“He told me he is very concerned about the cultural shifts we are living through, a Copernican revolution really — artificial intelligence, robotics, human relationships,” the prelate said. “He was inspired by Leo XIII, who in the midst of the Industrial Revolution wrote ‘Rerum Novarum,’ launching an important dialogue between the church and the modern world.”

4. Mother

Since my arrival back in church a year ago as a “re-lapsed Catholic”, my study of the saints has earned me a fundamental insight: that the mark of any Brother or Sister; Priest or Pope who takes seriously their spiritual life lies in their devotion to Mary, The Theotokos, Mother of God and the last Leo (XIII) was no exception, whose care for and consecration to Our Lady was so public, he was nicknamed “The Rosary Pope”.

Fitting then, that Prevost led the 40,000 strong crowd in reciting an “Ave Maria” in his first address and then days later, while the martyr-white papal insignia billowed beneath him and with neither music nor fanfare, our pope sings for us “Regina Caeli” (Queen of Heaven), a defining Easter hymn celebrating Christ’s triumphal resurrection as King of The Universe and the elevation of Mary as a result who becomes for us Queen of Heaven and Earth. As we seek to emulate her – the first Christian and symbol of the church – in drawing near to Christ, we bear Him to the world and like our King, claim her as our Queen Mother too.

A grand mystery indeed that Human Destiny is to follow in the footsteps of Mary, to accept the grace to sanctify ourselves and be elevated to glory; to channel the Divine Will as innocently and beautifully as she, which we do firstly out of love and humility, but as Leo XIV remarked in his first homily as Pope, will lead us to receive transcendent gifts “which surpass our current limits”.

Pope Leo is referring here to the glorification of human beings, who by worshipping Christ in spirit and truth, become his earthbound body, the blood-washed bride of His Royal Love and wed ourselves to the divine nature.

That Bob from Chicago professes this mystical call of Christianity to elevate Human Destiny and fearlessly names the centrality of Christ’s (and therefore our) resurrection is a wonderfully encouraging sign for Catholics the world over. That physical death is the end of the road for human consciousness is today taken for granted, and the spiritual rebirth claimed by the first Christians (who died in their millions rather than deny it) was possible through binding one’s being to Christ’s truth, way and life lies all but forgotten in the modern world, but it needn’t stay that way.

That Pope Leo isn’t – as the media might hope – digging about confusedly in the dirt for political alignment on diversity, equality and inclusion; how much carbon there is in the atmosphere or whether Trump or Biden’s deportation numbers are holier does not make him an unworthy successor of Pope Francis.

That he seeks over the political polarity of ‘left’ vs. ‘right’, the middle way of Catholic Social Teaching; extending solace to the migrant, empathy to the youth identifying as trans and charity to the poor while unreservedly pronouncing the God-given gifts of gender, of procreation and of human dignity and free will in the face of so many challenges to these things is reason not just for Catholics but for all of us to sigh in collective relief.

To release the breath we didn’t know we had been holding.