Leo XIII held to the necessity of Catholic cultural supremacy grounded in its moral authority. The constitutional and legal status of the Church was secondary, contingent, negotiable.
As far as I can tell, Robert Prevost published nothing about public religion. It nonetheless would seem that the Leonine notion that the magisterium is social glue would seem to be beyond his ken. I am confident that Pope Leo XIV will never say, as did Leo XIII in 1900 in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, that “[w]herever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result.”
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