Leo’s American Challenge

The June 29 solemnity of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul coincided with a symbolic moment in the relationship between the papacy and the global Church: Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pope, bestowing the pallium on eight fellow American archbishops. Leo’s election is obviously a major event, redrawing the geography of global Catholicism and reconfiguring intercontinental relations between the papacy and continental churches, especially the American church. It could be said that the Chicago River, and not the dreaded Rhine, is flowing into the Tiber: none of the watered-down, accommodationist German Catholicism anti-Vatican II conspiracists once feared, but a kind of American Catholicism not imaginable at the time of the council. Its arrival in Rome is not only an understandable source of pride for American Catholics, but might also be a much-needed unifying element in the U.S. Church.