The Pope’s First Anniversary Is Marked by More Sparring from the White House
Key takeaways
- Pope Leo XIV waves to a crowd during the weekly general audience at St.
- The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
- Pope Leo XIV’s first year as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church has, to the surprise of many, gone something like that.
Pope Leo XIV waves to a crowd during the weekly general audience at St. Peter’s Square, on May 6th.Photograph by Andreas Solaro / AFP / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story On June 2, 1979, Pope John Paul II set out from Rome on an apostolic journey, as papal trips away from the Vatican are called. In the eight months since his election, the former Karol Wojtyła had become a figure of fascination: he was the first Polish Pope, and the first non-Italian Pope in more than four hundred years; a youthful man (he was fifty-nine) who skied in the Alps; a charismatic speaker, whose journey to Mexico earlier in the year had drawn several millions of people. He was both a moral authority and a global celebrity. Even so, the trip that June took things to another level. It was to Poland, then still a satellite of the Soviet Union. There, the new Pope stepped into history. His public events drew six million people, in a country of thirty-five million. He didn’t denounce the Soviet regime directly but proposed a social order in which the state “wishes to express the full sovereignty of the nation,” and declared that “Christ will never approve” of a view of a human being “merely as a means of production.” Though oblique, John Paul’s message was a clear rebuke of state Communism. The Pope, the Times observed, had “made himself a totally novel and incalculable element in future East-West relations.”
The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
Pope Leo XIV’s first year as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church has, to the surprise of many, gone something like that. Since his election, on May 8, 2025, the former Robert Prevost has become a figure of fascination: the first American Pope, Chicago-born, and a citizen of Peru besides; an Augustinian friar whose efforts as a missionary and as the head of the order were little known even to experts; a still relatively young Pope, at the age of seventy, who is at ease with e-mail and Duolingo and WhatsApp, and likes to play tennis at a Vatican palace in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills southeast of Rome. He looks comfortable in both papal white and a White Sox cap. As he settled into the office, he was recognized as both a moral authority and a celebrity.