Did Leo XIV Bring a Catholic Awakening Or Was It the Other Way Around?
Cancel Culture was canceled after the 2024 election. A Catholic awakening began with the 2025 Conclave. Did Pope Leo XIV bring it, or did it bring us Pope Leo XIV?
May 28, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
On Sunday, May 18, 2025, I watched much of the Inaugural Mass for Pope Leo XIV broadcast by EWTN from St. Peter’s Square. Like many, I was amazed not only by the size of the crowd — estimated by The Wall Street Journal to be about 200,000 — but also by the makeup of that crowd. Jubilant young men and women, thousands of young families, priests, seminarians, religious sisters, energetic Catholic youth, and men and women of all ages celebrated the moment with brilliant smiles and deep respect. Not since the papacy of John Paul II have I witnessed such an outpouring of energy and exuberance in a Catholic setting.
I wrote a post back in 2018 entitled, “The Once and Future Catholic Church.” It began with a troubling but truthful account from the early days of Islam in the Seventh Century AD. It told a story that has since been spun into acceptability and normalcy across once-Catholic Europe. The brief story and its aftermath are historically important. We will link to that post again at the end of this one.
That post also profiled a fine article entitled “The Catholic Crisis” by Sohrab Ahmari in the May, 2018 issue of Commentary magazine. It was a review of the book, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism by Ross Douthat. At the time of his review, Sohrab Ahmari was a recent and celebrated convert to the Catholic faith. He was also the London editor for The Wall Street Journal. His Review and Douthat’s book were written during the papacy of Pope Francis. Here is an excerpt describing their experience and that of many before the Conclave of 2025:
“There is reason to worry that lately a spirit of relativism has entered the Roman Church that threatens to undermine its unity and catholicity. That should concern Catholics and non-Catholics, because the Church is the living bedrock of the West and one of the last bastions of the principle that moral truth is moral truth yesterday, today, a thousand years from now.”
That sacred trust, which the Church must hold and defend, calls to mind for me one of the basic tenets of Scriptural faith that is too often overlooked in any quest to abandon yesterday in anticipation of tomorrow: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
During the 12-year pontificate of Pope Francis, both of the Catholic writers cited above experienced a papacy that “thrived in ambiguity.” Among their list of perplexing notions was a media-hyped comment by Pope Francis that called into question the existence of hell. Defenders of the Pope excused the incident as a misreading of the Pope’s remarks by left-leaning atheist journalist, Eugenio Scalfari. However, as Mr. Ahmari pointed out it was the fifth interview Pope Francis had granted to that particular journalist.
At the same time, Pope Francis was unresponsive to requests for dialogue and clarification in a series of Dubia posed by Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke and other conservative prelates. The Pope, according to Ahmari, “first ignored and then ridiculed them.”
Sorab Ahmari also reported on Douthat’s “fascinating speculation” on the projected future of liberal Catholicism:
“Liberals simply don’t have the numbers … . Theological liberalism is in demographic decline, and liberal orders struggle to attract vocations. Church coffers may be full, but the pews are empty. The leading lights of theological liberalism are octogenarians, and there are no successors in the wings. Conservatives and traditionalists, meanwhile, have the numbers, the intellects and the energy. Orders that prize orthodoxy are thriving worldwide.”
The Conservative Rise
It is important to acknowledge where we have been. Two weeks before the Conclave and the election of a new pope, The Wall Street Journal published a most interesting Front Page analysis entitled, “Conservative U.S. Catholics Gain Sway” by Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner (WSJ, April 22, 2025). It was published on the day after the death of Pope Francis implying that much of its research and content was written prior to that development. The authors described that their analysis “focused attention on the Vatican’s fraught relationship with an American flock undergoing cultural and theological changes … .”
Consulting a number of Vatican observers and insiders, the authors presented keen insights on what they expected from the Conclave. The result, however, was entirely unexpected. The Conclave completed its mission just one day after it commenced. The Journal authors had cited a brief final meeting between Vice President JD Vance and Pope Francis on the day before the Pope’s death:
“For Francis, it was a final encounter with the conservative wing of American Catholicism that is flourishing and increasingly assertive at a time when the Church, more broadly, is struggling.”
Of interest, a companion article in the days before the Conclave, “Who Are the Frontrunners for the Papacy?” by Marcus Walker (WSJ, April 22, 2025) presented ten cardinals seen as “front-runners,” a misleading term that suggests a political campaign. Despite the secrecy of a conclave, it is by no means certain that any of the names proposed were “running” for the office. The one ultimately elected, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, was presented in the Journal article as a “dark horse.”
However, one of the commentators made a prescient statement before the Conclave began. In a lecture on the growth of Catholic conservatism, theologian David Deane spoke of JD Vance and his brief meeting with Pope Francis on the day before his death: “Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity … . Seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this.”
This was followed in the Chaffin and Zitner article in the Journal by a reflection from Timothy Gray, President of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school of theology outside St. Louis, MO that “emphasizes a return to the rigors of Scripture and Tradition”:
“A lot of progressives think that if the Church could just accommodate the modern world, it will stop its decline. But everywhere the Church has embraced the modern world and its contemporary values, it has died.”
Such comments may have been prophetic. The Conclave commenced just ten days later. After deliberating for only four voting sessions in less than two days, the Conclave elected “the dark horse,” Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, formerly Superior General of the Order of Saint Augustine.
The Catholic Project
In 2022, The Catholic Project, a research initiative of Catholic University in Washington, DC published the striking results of a survey of 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests. It found that among those ordained after 2010, 80 percent identify as conservative or orthodox while those who identify as liberal or progressives have faced a virtual collapse. Stephen P. White, Executive Director of The Catholic Project, called this “a massive shift among priests,” adding that this trend is rapidly spreading not only in the United States, but throughout much of the Western world.
A separate research project on Catholic priests by the Augustine Institute documented that younger priests tend to be much more conservative and traditional that older priests. This bears out from observations in comments and emails from our readers who find this distinction to be a positive development. Writing at the time for The Wall Street Journal, Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca reported on the strains of this trend in “Catholic Ideological Split Widens” (WSJ, Dec. 19, 2022):
“U.S. Catholic bishops elected conservative leaders (in 2022) continuing to resist a push from Pope Francis to put issues such as climate change and poverty on par with the bishops’ declared priority of opposing abortion.”
The bishops appointed by Pope Francis tended to mirror his priorities. His elevation of San Diego Archbishop Robert McElroy, a leading liberal among U.S. bishops, to the College of Cardinals and then as Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, is an example. That appointment was preceded two years earlier by the sudden, highly controversial removal of popular conservative Bishop Joseph Strickland from the Diocese of Tyler, Texas leaving many in that diocese and among conservatives throughout the United States reeling from the loss.
According to a WSJ article, Pope Francis had expressed his own discontent with some leaders in the U.S. Church. In 2023, he cited a “very strong, organized reactionary attitude” against him by conservatives in the U.S. Church, adding: “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless.” Seemingly in response, he removed Bishop Strickland from his post stirring up a reaction, manifested in distrust, among a majority of conservative U.S. Catholics.
There is thus a growing disparity in liberal versus conservative views as newly appointed bishops are more liberal while priests emerging from U.S. seminaries over the last few decades are more conservative and traditional. When seminarians and younger priests do not have their views of the Church and Catholic practice affirmed, stress and disillusionment develop and increase.
Since the 1980s, successive annual priesthood ordinations have grown more conservative. Each successive 10-year grouping in the ordained priesthood supports Church teaching on moral and theological issues more strongly than in the decade before. Those ordained after 2010, as a whole, are the most conservative. Younger priests represent a generation disillusioned with the ideas of progressive religious pluralism.
This had left an ever widening chasm between Pope Francis, his Episcopal appointments, and younger priests in the United States. The Catholic Project Study also revealed that 80 percent of U.S. priests ordained before 1980 approved strongly of Pope Francis, while only 20 percent of those ordained after 2010 shared that high approval.
According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, 19 percent of Americans report that they identify as Catholic. That dropped from 24 percent in a 2007 survey. In the 1970s, in excess of 50 percent of U.S. Catholics participated in Mass weekly. Today that has dropped to 25 percent. Catholic voters in 2020 were virtually split between left and right politically. In 2024 they turned sharply for Donald Trump increasing Catholic vote support for him by an 11 point margin.
Pope Leo XIV has been widely presented in the media as “the first American Pope.” In actuality, however, he has served the Church as a citizen of the world. Is all this priestly interest in respect for orthodoxy a plague upon the Church? Or is it the whispering of the Holy Spirit, a whispering that also placed Leo XIV in the Chair of Peter? Ponder for a moment the massive crowd in St. Peter’s Square in the Inauguration Mass for His Holiness Leo XIV for your answer. Perhaps there is something to be said for a pope to be in the world but not of it.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
The Once and Future Catholic Church
Pope Francis Had a Challenge for the Prodigal Son’s Older Brother
The Vatican Today: Cardinal George Pell’s Last Gift to the Church
Pray for the papacy of Pope Leo XIV
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”