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As Leo marks his inaugural Easter as pontiff, almost a year after his predecessor’s death, some Catholics are still trying to work out what kind of pontiff he is.
The feast – the most important in the church’s calendar – comes against the backdrop of war in the Middle East, sparked by the US-Israeli strikes in Iran.
Leo, mild-mannered and diplomatic compared with the charismatic but often hasty and divisive Francis, has on more than one occasion indirectly rebuked the actions of US president Donald Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and on Palm Sunday delivered his strongest condemnation yet when he said God ignores the prayers of leaders with “hands full of blood”.
And while popes rarely criticise world leaders by name, instead railing against their policies, Leo did name Trump on Tuesday when he told journalists he hoped the US president would find an “off-ramp” to end the war in Iran.
Still, some Catholics are hoping for a more explicit moral reckoning from their pope.
“I’d like to see him be a bit more vocal about what’s going on in the world, we are in such turmoil,” said Joanne Coleman, a religion teacher from Ireland. Speaking as the pope delivered his general audience in St Peter’s Square on Wednesday morning, she added: “I think he’s a good person with good intentions but he must get louder, especially with Trump.”
Gabriele, who works at a souvenir shop on the corner of the square, agrees. “People say to give him time, but now is not the time for being timid. He’s an American for goodness sake – I thought they were supposed to be more direct?”
Francis often condemned Trump’s policies on issues such as immigration and the climate crisis, and ruptured Vatican relations with Israel after sharply criticising its war on Gaza.
In the months before being elected pontiff, when he was cardinal Robert Prevost, Leo made no secret of his distaste for the Trump government’s policies, criticising its immigration and deportation plans on social media and sharing an op-ed published in the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” after the US vice-president claimed Christianity’s concept of love was to prioritise one’s family before others.
This led to an expectation that Leo would be just as publicly outspoken as Francis – but diplomacy was quickly favoured: Vance and Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, were hosted at the Vatican within two weeks of Leo’s election.
Iacopo Scaramuzzi, the Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica newspaper, said Leo was a “pragmatic” person whose strategy is “calibrated not on the resonance of his words but on the efficacy of his actions”, pointing to the Vatican’s behind-the-scenes role as a mediator in Venezuela and Cuba and attempts to prevent US military action in both countries.
“The Holy See is playing a role of mediation within its limits,” said Scaramuzzi. “It can’t present its intervention as a magic wand or the divine intervention … the Holy See is a chancellor listened to throughout the world because it has a moral authority, but also a relative power.”
In July last year, Leo toughened his tone on Israel when he condemned the “barbarity” of the Gaza war, including a strike that hit the strip’s only Catholic church.
Two months later, he held a private audience at the Vatican with Israeli president Isaac Herzog, in an effort to restore diplomatic attempts to end the war.
Holy Week began with another clash, after Israeli police prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, an Italian archbishop with Catholic jurisdiction across Israel and the Palestinian territories, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to conduct mass on Palm Sunday.
The US, France and Italy criticised the incident, and the US ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, a devout evangelical Christian, described it as “an unfortunate overreach”.
Israeli authorities subsequently apologised to Pizzaballa, a move Scaramuzzi said was probably due to Leo’s influence.
Scaramuzzi believes the Vatican is discreetly intervening with the White House too, perhaps using the channel established with Vance and Rubio.
“We’re in a very delicate period and Leo’s strategy is to use his influence and work discreetly rather than make public pronouncements. He appears soft in form, but is strong in substance.”
As Leo moves cautiously, he has been relying on his college of cardinals to make harsher criticisms of the US-Israeli decision to go to war in Iran without the UN’s backing.
In March, Cardinal Domenico Battaglia in Naples addressed an open letter to “the merchants of death” profiting from weapons’ sales, while the Washington DC cardinal Robert McElroy said the conflict “fails to meet the just war threshold for a morally legitimate war”.
And while he will refrain from naming names, he is expected to up his opposition to the war in Iran and other wars in his promotion of peace during his Easter Sunday address, which tends to be as much a political message as it is a spiritual one.
“When people say they want him to be louder, what they’re saying is they want him to be Francis,” said Andrea Vreede, Vatican correspondent for NOS, the Dutch public radio and TV network.
“His words might not be accompanied by fireworks or unexpected gestures, which was Francis, but at the same time Leo is not mincing his words. The problem is he’s not being heard enough, but I think since Palm Sunday, that is changing.”
