Robert Francis Prevost has been elected pope, taking the title Leo XIV. He turns into the religious chief of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, the primary US pope, the primary be a member of the Augustinian Order of friars, and the 267th holder of the workplace in succession to St Peter.
The Chicago-born Prevost, who’s aged 69, has spent a lot of his life as a priest as an Augustinian missionary in Peru, and was head of the Augustinian order, as prior common, in 2001-13. He was made Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru by his predecessor Pope Francis in 2014, and a cardinal in 2023. (In 2015 he grew to become a naturalised Peruvian citizen and holds twin citizenship.)
By way of his workplace, Leo XIV turns into proprietor in belief of the nice artwork and architectural treasures of Vatican Metropolis, and shall be regarded to as an ethical authority, a world diplomat, and a voice for social justice according to the teachings of the Catholic church and the pursuit of world peace.
In the course of the latest conclave that elected him, he was spoken of as a reasonable and bridge-builder, and is seen as a successor who will preserve Francis’s stand on migrants, the poor and social justice. He regarded visibly moved as he uttered his first phrases as pope to the world from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica: “Peace be with you.”
Leo’s actions as pope shall be analysed for the way they align with or differ from these of his predecessors, whether or not in political, social, doctrinal or liturgical issues. This shall be finished with specific reference to the affect of his three speedy predecessors: two largely conservative pontiffs—John Paul II (pope from 1978-2005) and Benedict XVI (2005-13)—and the extra progressive Francis (2013-25), the primary pope from the Americas and the primary from the World South.
Final 12 months, whereas nonetheless president of the Pontifical Fee for Latin America and Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, the then Cardinal Prevost clearly adopted Francis’s ground-breaking lead on the church’s responsibility to deal with local weather change.
Talking in relation to the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (reward be to you)—during which Francis had introduced local weather grow to be Catholic doctrine—Prevost mentioned that it was time to maneuver “from phrases to motion” and to behave on the idea of the Catholic church’s social doctrine. In accordance with Vatican Information Prevost mentioned that “‘Dominion over nature’—the duty which God gave humanity—mustn’t change into ‘tyrannical’. It have to be a ‘relationship of reciprocity’ with the setting.”
The examples of latest pontificates point out that the brand new pope’s workplace offers him the stature, and the standard foundations, to be an influential chief in a number of areas—from artwork historical past to local weather change—of particular curiosity to cultural and visible arts organisations.
Artwork historical past
The brand new pope turns into head of one of many historic revealed religions, with final cost not simply of the Vatican Museums and Library, with their holdings protecting two millennia of Christianity, but in addition the rest of the constructed patrimony of the tiny Vatican Metropolis state on the coronary heart of Rome.
In addition to St Peter’s, an ideal Renaissance edifice and a constructing of particular non secular and architectural significance, the constructed patrimony consists of the Sistine Chapel and its well-known ensemble of late Fifteenth- and early Sixteenth-century frescoes; the jewel-like Niccoline Chapel adorned with frescoes by Fra Angelico; and the Raphael flats, or stanze, within the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, with the artist’s The College of Athens their crowning achievement. The Vatican additionally owns and maintains three papal basilicas in Rome which might be outdoors the Vatican Metropolis however owned and run by the Holy See—Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano and San Paolo Fuori le Mura.
Beneath Benedict XVI and Francis, the Vatican Museums grew to become concerned as by no means earlier than in exhibition loans to and from worldwide museums, in a parallel improvement to the best way that the Royal Assortment Belief was opened as much as the world of artwork historical past in the course of the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Raphael, Pope Leo X and cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de Rossi (1518-20) Uffizi Gallery, Public area, by way of Wikimedia Commons
Two earlier Leos—Popes Leo X and XI—had been members of the nice Medici clan of artwork patrons. Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the topic of one of the vital intimate and sudden of papal portraits, Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X and cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi (1518-20), now within the assortment of Musei degli Uffizi.
Objects of devotion
Latest historical past means that the brand new pope shall be ready to affect the style of the Catholic trustworthy in objects of devotion. In the course of the early weeks of the worldwide pandemic in 2020, Francis gave a robust Easter speech, standing alone, within the rain and windswept darkness of St Peter’s Piazza. He prayed for deliverance from Covid-19 accompanied by a replica of his favorite devotional picture: the Salus Populi Romani icon from the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
The Salus Populi Romani (the Salvation of the Roman Individuals), as its title suggests, has an extended connection to the town of Rome. One other of Francis’s favorite photos, Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner’s Mary, Untier of Knots (round 1700), was a revelation to many Catholics, one which he popularised first in Argentina after which throughout the globe. The picture’s topic spoke to Francis’s essentially sensible, down-to-earth nature; and his insistence that choices needed to be taken with thought, their difficulties “untied”.
Up to date artwork
4 centuries on from the period of the nice Renaissance artwork patron Popes—Julius II, Paul III, Paul V and City VIII—Pope Pius XII in 1949 launched a contest to construct three new bronze doorways to hyperlink the portico of the basilica to the nave, changing outdated doorways. Giacomo Manzù’s Door of Loss of life was devoted by Pope Paul VI in 1964.
Paul VI went on to set the Vatican on a concerted course of amassing modern artwork. His galleries of worldwide Trendy and modern work opened within the Vatican Museums in 1973, that includes the acquisition of labor by artists together with Manzù, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio Morandi, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
Benedict XVI, with the help of Antonio Paolucci, the pinnacle of the Vatican Museums, and Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s minister of tradition, made a brand new connection to modern artwork, which led to the Vatican having its first pavilion on the Venice Biennale in 2013 and later its first on the Architectural Biennale in 2018.
On 21 November 2009 Benedict held a gathering within the Sistine Chapel with a world group of a number of hundred artists of many disciplines, together with the artists Invoice Viola, Anish Kapoor and Jannis Kounellis, and the architects Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. Benedict referred again to an equal assembly that Paul VI had held 45 years earlier during which Paul had instructed the 1964 group: “We’d like you. We’d like your collaboration with a view to perform our ministry, which consists, as , in preaching and rendering accessible and understandable to the minds and hearts of our individuals the issues of the spirit.”
In 2021 Pope Francis opened a recent artwork gallery within the Vatican library. With that gesture he adopted up on remarks he had made in within the 2015 e book La Mia Thought di Arte (my concept of artwork)—primarily based on his conversations with the journalist Tiziana Lupi—when he mentioned: “The Vatican Museums should try to be a spot of magnificence and welcome. They have to embrace new types of artwork. They have to throw open their doorways to individuals from around the globe and function an instrument for dialogue between completely different cultures and religions, an instrument for peace.”
Francis attended the 2024 Venice Biennale, the primary pontiff to go to the occasion, when he toured the Vatican pavilion and talked about the late Catholic nun and activist Corita Kent—together with Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois—as feminine artists whose works have “one thing vital to show us”.
Cultural restitution
Beneath Francis, the papacy made numerous symbolic gestures round creative and cultural restitution. In November 2022 Francis ordered the Vatican Museums to return three Parthenon marble fragments to Greece, which had been held of their collections for the reason that nineteenth century.
The three sculptural fragments had been held by the Gregoriano Profano Museum, dwelling to the Holy See’s collections of antiquities. They embody a part of the pinnacle of the horse pulling Athena’s chariot within the frieze on the west facet of the Parthenon, and components of the heads of a boy and a bearded man.
This gesture was freighted with diplomatic symbolism because it adopted Francis’s 2021 go to to Athens. There, he had visited Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian archbishop of Athens and head of the Greek Orthodox Church, and made a night-time go to to the Parthenon.
“Historical past makes its weight felt, and right here, at this time,” Francis mentioned, “I really feel the necessity to ask anew for the forgiveness of God and of our brothers and sisters for the errors dedicated by many Catholics.”
Local weather change
Francis set a robust mannequin for addressing local weather change in Catholic doctrine by issuing Laudato Si’, which addressed the local weather disaster, and calling for shared stewardship of the setting. That encyclical, issued within the lead-up to the signing of the UN’s 2015 Paris local weather accord, was the primary time that the Catholic church had made local weather change a part of its instructing. Throughout his Venice Biennale go to in 2024, Francis addressed a crowd of 10,000 in Piazza San Marco, emphasising the hazard that local weather change posed to the town. “Venice is one with the waters on which it stands, and with out the care and safety of this pure setting it may even stop to exist.”
Francis linked the local weather emergency to revenue equality, and the pope’s mission to the poor, one thing that Leo publicly supported final November at a convention on local weather change held in Rome by the embassies of Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela to the Holy See.
“The human setting and the pure setting deteriorate collectively; we can not adequately fight environmental degradation except we attend to causes associated to human and social degradation,” Francis wrote in Laudato Si’ . “The truth is, the deterioration of the setting and of society impacts probably the most weak individuals on the planet… For instance, the depletion of fishing reserves particularly hurts small fishing communities with out the means to switch these sources; water air pollution notably impacts the poor who can not purchase bottled water; and rises within the sea degree primarily have an effect on impoverished coastal populations who’ve nowhere else to go.”
