What Brings Me Hope? Our New Pope!

Roxane Salonen shares her reaction to learning about our new Holy Father, and how she finds a new hope in our new pope.

For the Jubilee of Hope, our writers reflect on prayer as a source of hope in their lives.

I’m writing this less than a week after Pope Leo XIV emerged on the balcony at St. Peter’s Square in Rome, following the announcement: “Habemus Papam!”

By the time this reaches you, our new Holy Father will have been with us a few months, but right now, he’s still brand new, and I’ve been filled with an incredible hope. My hope is our new pope!

On May 8, when the exciting avalanche of news began unfolding, I was recording a remote podcast and had to ignore the 43 texts that had arrived. On our short break, my guest, glancing at his phone, suddenly announced, “We have some surprising news! We have a pope, and he’s American!”

My resulting gasp is fixed in perpetuity through the recording, but even without it, I’ll long remember where I was when I heard Cardinal Robert Prevost had been elected our new shepherd.

My podcast guest was another Robert, Princeton University professor Dr. Robert P. George. Due to a tight time constraint, we couldn’t process the news together. Instead, we had to push forward with our work, and push back the questions emerging; namely, “How can this be?!”

An American-born Pope? Never!

Like most, we’d been hearing an American pope was likely out of the question. And yet, here we were, and there it was.

That evening, after a four-hour drive, I was finally able to peek at the news to learn more about our new pontiff, but it was brief. The next morning, in a hotel before a conference, grabbing my continental breakfast, I noticed someone on TV in the hotel café being interviewed on CBS who looked just like Pope Leo. It was his older brother.

In that moment, I knew this papacy was going to be so much different from any others; that, as Americans, we’d have more immediate access to our pope than ever before, along with his history, proclivities, and so much more.

Maybe it’s because my father’s name is Robert, and his closest brother, Leo; or that we’re a tennis-playing family, and apparently our new pope is, too; or that our Fargo Diocese has close ties with Peru, the pope’s other country of residence. Whatever it is, my soul has been uplifted in an unexpected way.

I’m sure this is what people in Poland felt when Karol Józef Wojtyła burst onto the scene, and those in Germany when Joseph Alois Ratzinger was elected shepherd of the Church universal, and the folks in Argentina when Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave his first papal wave. Now, unexpectedly, we also get to experience a close relationship to the vicar of Christ.

A Hope for the Whole World

In recent days, I’ve had the chance to interview a number of local priests and lay people who have ties to our Holy Father. Our bishop recently visited Peru as part of the Friends of Chimbote mission, which started here as an outreach to the poor there. Our two countries have a lot to offer each other, and beyond.

And so it is that I find a renewed and startling hope, not just for the Church, but for the world. Not just for the present, but for the future.

I’m realizing how thirsty we were for this kind of energy. In Pope Leo, with his warm, genuine smile, great intellect, and desire to listen carefully to the needs around him, we seem to have been given a beautiful gift by God himself.

When I first heard Pope Leo speak in English, I remarked to my husband: “This is crazy! For the first time ever, we are hearing a pope speak our language as his first language. It’s so beautiful!”

I feel hope about this pope because, despite all the needs in the world, and all our inadequacies as Americans, we, too, need faith. We, too, need a heart who will hear us. We, too, need to know that the one who is leading us sees us. And it seems like, for many reasons, this is possible in ways it never was before.

I am hopeful, but more than that, I am grateful to God for bringing this solace, following on the heels of the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday. I sense the Holy Spirit at work in a big way right now, and I hope you feel it too!

null

As noted in an article sharing Pope Leo’s reaction to being named a cardinal by Pope Francis, Bishop Prevost had replied, “As I have tried to do throughout my religious life, I said yes, go ahead with the great adventure of being a follower of Christ.”

And what an adventure it is, for Pope Leo, and indeed, for each of us who has chosen Christ to be our light!