Like Pope Francis, Leo XIV comes from the “New World.” Once considered the furthest reaches of mission territory, the Americas now represent almost half of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Both American popes were born and raised in the suburbs of two major cities, comparable in size, which saw large immigrant Catholic populations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both witnessed the power of immigrant faith and the allure of practical atheism in a worldly metropolis. Those immigrant communities, sustained by a concrete faith of devotions and working-class perseverance, often experienced the brunt of wealth inequality on the economic underside of majestic skyscrapers and Parisian-style affluence.
Robert Francis Prevost was growing up on the South Side as Chicago’s Union Stock Yards—a staple of American capitalism brutally depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—was shutting down. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was Cardinal-Archbishop of Buenos Aires when the country crippled under the neoliberal crisis of 2001 coming from decades-long austerity measures imposed by international agencies to clear the nation’s debt. Wage slavery and debt slavery, especially among immigrant communities of Chicago’s South Side and the villas Archbishop Bergoglio often visited, were a familiar feature of the places from which Francis and Leo originated in the Americas.
Francis and Leo have different styles and cadences, to be sure, but their papacies share a place-based knowledge from the Americas, or América, which has informed a radical model of pastoral leadership committed to missionary discipleship and social justice. The Gospel and sociocultural liberation go hand in hand for them. Their religious vows owing to the Society of Jesus and the Augustinians have generated deep social awareness about the evil of material poverty rooted in the evangelical freedom of voluntary poverty. Their shared pastoral task has involved articulating and elaborating the Church’s new evangelization, which, as Pope John Paul II recognized in Centesimus Annus (The Hundredth Year), demands Catholic social doctrine as an essential element in proclaiming the Word.
When Leo XIV first addressed the College of Cardinals in May 2025, he identified his papacy’s “complete commitment” to the Second Vatican Council, with Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) serving as guide for navigating the renewal of the Church. Although not a social encyclical, Francis’s apostolic exhortation was the fruit of the synod on the new evangelization. Among other things, it offered a charter on the social dimension of evangelization by calling on all Christians to commit themselves to the liberation of the poor through their greater inclusion in society. Synodality, popular piety, sensus fidei (sense of the faith), and the option for the poor were among the fundamental points of Francis’s exhortation highlighted by Leo.
The term “new evangelization,” with its inflection on the holistic meaning of liberation, emerged from Latin American theology after Vatican II and was inspired by Pope Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi (Evangelization in the Modern World). A bishop and martyr-saint of that postconciliar era who embodied the new evangelization most profoundly in América was none other than Monseñor Óscar Romero. His reinterpretation of Catholic social doctrine under El Salvador’s violent military dictatorship led him to accompany and die alongside the rural farmworkers trapped in poverty and killed in their efforts to pursue social justice and land reform. Against the bloody impunity of the national security state, and in contrast to the armed insurrection of leftist organizations, Romero called for a “holy revolution” (santa revolución) of personal conversion and societal transformation based on Christ’s love.
Pope Francis had a great affection for Romero, beatifying and canonizing the Saint of the Americas during his papacy. Francis sometimes invoked the language of revolution positively in his preaching and social thought, beginning with the revolution of tenderness and mercy not just within but between persons through concrete acts of love and service. The neighbor love of the Good Samaritan and the filial love of children, as he pointed out in his 2017 TED Talk, illustrate the revolution of tenderness. Francis, having led the Jesuits amid revolutionary violence in 1970s Argentina, never considered revolution an individual affair but something that involved an “us” communicating the love of Christ to one another.
Leo XIV, in a neo-Augustinian spirit, has already invoked the theological language of revolution. During his vacation stay at Castel Gandolfo in July, he preached on Christ as the Good Samaritan, who shows us how to love one another with compassion by first healing us through neighbor love. What is needed today, Leo says, is a “revolution of love.” For Leo, such love, as for his friend and predecessor, Francis, is the beating, fleshy Sacred Heart of Jesus that turns anonymity, algorithms, and automation on their head. “For his love alone,” Francis wrote in Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us), “can bring about a new humanity” as technocratic societies draw dangerously closer to an inhumane posthuman world of artificial intelligence and, God forbid it, artificial general intelligence.
Will this revolution of love be a theme of Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical? Perhaps. Leo told the cardinals that one of the reasons he chose the nineteenth-century pioneer of modern Catholic social teaching as his namesake was because of the challenges to labor justice posed by the industrial revolution. The modern industrial revolution that eventually brought Bolshevist revolution and fascist revolution has, after the fall of the communist international and the Soviet Bloc, meant the reign of neoliberalism and the start of the digital revolution. Despite all these changes in the last century, the lives of migrant workers remain as precarious as ever and now loneliness, depression, and social anxiety afflict generations of children raised on flat screens and smart devices.
The tyranny of money and the tyranny of digital technology beg the question of revolution today like never before. Individual murderers like Luigi Mangione or Theodore Kaczynski are not a revolutionary option. Yet neither is the political revolution pursued by the far-right executive authoritarianism of the MAGA presidency or Project 2025. Leo XIV, like Francis before him, is not a counterrevolutionary. Indeed, he is calling for a revolution of love that liberates people and cultures from social and ecological sins and the death of the soul.
The American popes demonstrate a world Church come of age. Modern political revolutions on this side of the Atlantic were not necessarily anti-Catholic nor atheist. In América the Catholic Church has an ambivalent historical relationship to revolution in the struggles for independence from European empires. American Catholicism has resources to interpret revolution theologically, as seen in Romero and Francis, but also Dorothy Day’s “revolution of the heart.”
In late antiquity, St. Augustine appealed to a Christian order of love based on Christ’s mercy, which directly opposed false virtues of justice and benevolence esteemed by Roman imperial ambition and greed. As Leo XIV knows full well about our current vice president, the “Christian” order of love cannot be naturalized and ranked strictly according to biological kinship and political proximity. Jesus contrasted the natural love of publicans and pagans and even Jewish priests with the agapic love of God preached in the Sermon on the Mount and described in the Samaritan parable. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?”
Instead, loving your enemy, loving the stranger in need, and loving the poor and vulnerable are the criteria of Christian love. This revolution of love casts the mighty from their thrones, sends the rich away empty, and divides individual members of a single family. It is a divine love that turns the world upside down by making simple children, not enlightened adults, the first in the Kingdom. Leo XIV has a lot more to teach us about God’s revolutionary love with Augustine and Pope Francis at his sides.
