Pope Leo XIV reflects on rapid election, spiritual foundation during inaugural travels

Somewhere over the Atlantic, Pope Leo XIV sat down with reporters and, for the first time since his election five months earlier, talked openly about what had been running through his mind when the votes started tilting his way. The conclave in May had moved with unusual speed—four ballots on the second day, and by the third round it was already clear that the former Cardinal Robert Prevost would become the first American pope in history. He described the moment with a kind of settled acceptance: he took a breath, looked at the arithmetic of the votes, and handed it over. "Here we go Lord. You're in charge and you lead the way," he told the reporters gathered in the cabin of the papal plane, returning from his inaugural journey to Turkey and Lebanon.

What emerged during that half-hour airborne press conference was a portrait of a man far more at ease than he had seemed in his earliest public appearances. Leo moved fluidly between English, Spanish, and Italian, deflecting questions about his expressive face with humor—"You're not always correct" when journalists tried to read his reactions—and showing he had been paying close attention to how the media had been covering him. But beneath the comfort and the jokes lay something more fundamental: a spirituality rooted in surrender. He pointed reporters toward a seventeenth-century book called "The Practice of the Presence of God" by Brother Lawrence, a Carmelite friar. The book describes a form of prayer in which a person simply gives his life to the Lord and allows the Lord to lead. That had been his spiritual foundation for many years, Leo said, through the years he spent in Peru during waves of terrorism, through the unexpected calls to service that had taken him places he never imagined going.

The Lebanon leg of his trip had given him a visceral sense of what it means to move through the world as pope. The crowds had been enormous, and the energy from young Catholics had struck him as almost overwhelming. He found himself thinking about the distinction between what those crowds were actually there for. "They're here because they want to see Jesus Christ and they want to see a messenger of peace," he said. The enthusiasm was, in his word, awe-inspiring. He hoped he would never grow accustomed to it, never stop appreciating what those young people were showing him.

On the practical questions of statecraft and diplomacy, Leo proved willing to wade into contested terrain. Asked about Venezuela, he pushed back gently against the language of military threat coming from Washington. Dialogue was better, he said. Economic pressure, perhaps. But the voices from the United States shifted too frequently, and there were other ways to pursue change if that was what the administration wanted to do. He was careful not to prescribe, but the preference for conversation over coercion was clear.

Looking ahead, Leo laid out an ambitious travel schedule that signaled a pope intent on rebuilding papal presence in regions that had been neglected. He wanted to visit Africa next year, multiple countries, but Algeria especially—because of its role in Christian-Muslim dialogue and because of St. Augustine, the fifth-century theologian whose work had inspired Leo's own religious order. Between 2026 and 2027, he hoped to make it to three countries in Latin America: Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru. Peru held particular weight. He had lived there for two decades as a missionary, and Argentina had been waiting for a papal visit since Pope Francis's election in 2013, when the Argentine pontiff had never returned home. Leo seemed to understand that his presence in these places would carry meaning beyond the ceremonial—a signal that the Church was paying attention, that these regions mattered, that the pope himself was willing to show up.