Pope Says His Biggest Challenge Since Election Is Being a World Leader
By: Our Sunday Visitor
ROME (CNS) — Humanity has the potential to overcome the violence and hatred that is increasingly dividing people, Pope Leo XIV said in an excerpt from his first interview as pope.
“I think it’s very important to start a deeper reflection, of trying to figure out: Why is the world so polarized? What’s going on?” he said, pointing to several different “elements that have led to this,” including the “crisis of 2020” because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ever-widening earnings gap between the working class and the wealthy as well as the loss of a sense of what life is really about.
“The news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world…. What does that mean, and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble,” he said.
A series of excerpts was published on September 14, the Pope’s 70th birthday, by the Catholic online news outlet, Crux, ahead of the September 18 publication of the book, “Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the XXI Century,” in Spanish by Penguin Peru. English and Portuguese editions of the book will be released in early 2026.
Learning to be a world leader
The book includes two separate interviews totaling about three hours of conversation in July between Pope Leo XIV and Elise Allen, Crux’s senior correspondent. The excerpts included topics such as the Pope’s favorite sports teams, how he was settling into his role as pope, the war in Ukraine, synodality, and the increasing polarization in the world.
Asked about how he is adapting to being the pope after his election on May 8, he said, “There’s still a huge learning curve ahead of me.”
The pastoral part has not been difficult, he said, “although I’m surprised at the response, how great it continues to be.”
What is totally new, he said, “is being thrown onto the level of world leader. It’s very public; people know the phone conversations or meetings I’ve had with the heads of state of a number of different governments, countries around the world, in a time when the voice of the church has a significant role to play.”
Pope Leo XIV told Allen, “We live in times when ‘polarization’ seems to be one of the words of the day, but it’s not helping anybody. Or if it’s helping anyone, it’s very few when everyone else is suffering.”
“We have to continue to remind ourselves of the potential that humanity has to overcome the violence and the hatred that is just dividing us more and more,” he said.
Addressing the roots of division
When asked how polarization can be resolved, the pope said people need to reflect on and talk about what led to the divisions.
“I don’t pretend to have all the answers,” he said, but “perhaps in some places the loss of a higher sense of what human life is about” is the root of the problem, because if people lose the sense of the values of human life, the family and society, then “what matters anymore?”
Other factors contribute, too, he said, but “one which I think is very significant is the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive.”
“For example, CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving, the last figure I saw it’s 600 times more than what average workers are receiving,” he said, commenting then on news that a proposed compensation package from Tesla could make its CEO, Musk, become the world’s first trillionaire.
Synodality could be a sort of antidote to polarization by being “a way of addressing some of the greatest challenges that we have in the world today,” he added.
“If we listen to the Gospel, and if we reflect upon it together, and if we strive to walk forward together, listening to one another, trying to discover what God is saying to us today, there is a lot to be gained for us there,” he said.
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