A year to the day after he became the first American to be elected to the papacy, Pope Leo XIV closed his first twelve months in office on Saturday with a quiet morning Mass in the Casa Santa Marta and a Regina Coeli address from the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St Peter's Square. The reflective tone marked an anniversary that Vatican officials had decided not to formally commemorate, in keeping with the pope's expressed dislike of self-celebration.
Robert Francis Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV after his election by the conclave on May 8 last year, has used the early months of his pontificate to position himself as the most insistently public papal voice against war since John Paul II opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has condemned the United States-Israel campaign against Iran in seven separate Sunday addresses, has called the Strait of Hormuz operation "a violence against the freedom of the seas", and has spoken twice with the Iranian president by telephone.
That posture has cost him a steadily worsening public relationship with President Donald Trump. The two men have not spoken since November and Mr Trump has attacked the pope by name on Truth Social on at least eleven occasions, most recently on Thursday, when he accused him of "Marxist instincts" and of "siding with the worst people on Earth". The Vatican has not responded to any of the attacks individually, although a senior curial official said on Saturday that the pope considered them "a sadness, not a wound".
Inside the Vatican, the first year has been notable for the unusually rapid clearance of paperwork. The pope has appointed seventeen new diocesan bishops in the United States and twenty-three in Latin America; cleared the long-stalled abuse-protocol revisions begun under Francis; and finalised the closure of three Vatican congregations into a single Dicastery for Promoting the Christian Life, the most consequential structural change to the Roman Curia since 2022.
The pope is expected to publish the first encyclical of his pontificate before the end of the month. Vatican sources have indicated that the text will focus on the moral economy of artificial intelligence and is likely to take up the title Lumen Mentis. A one-week pastoral visit to Spain, including stops in Madrid, Avila and Santiago de Compostela, has been scheduled for the second week of June, his second international trip after the four-nation Africa tour in March.