The Pope

When Leo XIV set foot in Madrid, I thought of my father. Not because he was religious; he wasn't. Or rather, he was in his own way, much like a whole generation of Spaniards who still stepped inside a church solely to bid farewell to deceased friends. I thought of him because popes are a way of measuring time. Some people remember their lives through World Cups; others through governments. I am beginning to believe that popes can also be used to count the years. John Paul II was the youth of the world. Benedict XVI was the exhaustion of Europe. Francis was a case of “wanting to but not being able to”. And Leo XIV arrives at a moment when the West resembles a man who has lost the keys to his own house.

Robert Francis Prevost - born in Chicago, elected on 8 May 2025 as the successor to Francis - is the 267th pope of the Catholic Church. He is the first pontiff born in the United States and the first from the Order of Saint Augustine. Yet biographies never truly explain a person; they are merely a succession of dates. Human beings are something else entirely. We are a succession of losses. Perhaps that is why Leo XIV interests me: he appears in an era that has lost faith in almost everything. Not just religious faith, but political, economic and emotional faith as well.

We live surrounded by miraculous technologies, yet believing in the future feels increasingly difficult. The very word “future” has become suspect. My parents believed in the future. I believe in memory. The youth believe in screens. And in the midst of this transition, a man dressed in white appears, speaking of peace. It is an image that is ancient and, at the exact same time, radically new.

I like this Pope. I don't know why, but I do. It feels to me as though this Pope genuinely has something to do with God. Perhaps Leo XIV's mission is not to restore faith to believers, but to remind the sceptics that a society needs something more than money, consumption and algorithms to keep existing.

I do not know what the pontificate of Leo XIV will look like. But he is American, and Americans are new - by which I mean they are not worn out by history and ideology in the way we Europeans are. Perhaps 20 years from now we will remember this beginning as just another fleeting moment in history. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we will simply remember the image of a man dressed in white stepping onto a balcony while millions of people looked up.

I would have liked to meet him - to meet him as a writer, which is what I am - but he has gone to dine with the monarchs and the powerful, as always. I will never know him. He has another agenda, and I am never on the agenda of the powerful of this world. Perhaps my name is in the agenda of Jesus of Nazareth. But that agenda does not exist.