With the end of the summer schedule now at hand, the Vatican is gearing back up to a normal working schedule.
At the same time, Pope Leo XIV is entering a new phase of his reign, well past the first 100 days and approaching the point of starting “business as usual” — however he will choose to shape it.
Coming soon are expected to be his first moves in the gradual process of a papal cabinet reshuffle, with at least a few senior curial appointments expected in early September.
Other pressing administrative matters will need to occupy at least some of the pope’s attention in Vatican City.
And around Rome, Leo will need to oversee the closing months of the Jubilee Year, with pilgrims likely to flood the city for the canonizations of Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis in October.
But look beyond the Vatican, Leo will soon likely also approve the announcement of his first slate of international travel as pope.
Where he goes, and when, could end up telling us a great deal about how he sees himself inhabiting the office of Bishop of Rome.
While it hasn’t been formally re-confirmed, the universal expectation is that Leo’s first marquee trip will be to Turkey in November.
Pope Francis had, prior to his illness and death earlier this year, inked in the date of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea, and had planned to attend a major ecumenical event there, with himself and the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I as the effective co-headliners.
Ecumenical rapprochement with the Orthodox Church was a key priority of the Francis pontificate, and the mutual exchanges of gifts, greetings, and visits between the leaders of the Eastern and Western Churches was a notable success of the previous pope — so much so that talk of some kind of formal reconciliation became part of the background noise of inter-ecclesial conversations.
While no firm proposal for a healing of the Great Schism has ever materialized, quietly coded gestures appeared towards that end, for example the discrete readoption by Francis of the papal title Patriarch of the West.
For Leo, keeping the date in Turkey in November — originally set to involve the pope flying to Istanbul to visit Bartholomew in his patriarchal see, with both then traveling to Nicea together — seems like an easy and obvious choice.
The local diplomatic and security arrangements will have already been set in motion prior to Leo’s election and a decision by Leo not to attend would — whatever the actual reasons for it — be interpreted as a seismic ecumenical snub to Constantinople.
Assuming Leo goes to Nicea, then, the point of interest shifts to how well he is able to continue the cordial personal relationship Francis appeared to enjoy with the patriarch.
Francis and Bartholomew, 85, were of a generation. And, while the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople occupy very different kinds of leadership positions within their Churches, both were juggling often fractious intra-ecclesial relations. Something over which they could bond.
Indeed, while the circumstances were of themselves often regrettable, disagreements within the respective Catholic and Orthodox Communions on occasion (though by no means always) seemed to open up possibilities for enhanced dialogue between Rome and Constantinople:
The deepening split between the Russo-sphere of the Orthodox Communion and the rest of the Eastern Churches actually saw some of the more intractable opponents of dialogue with Rome remove themselves from the process.
And the often divisive global synodal process under Francis was taken by some observers as a modeling of a more decentralized approach to universal Church governance more palatable to Eastern Church leaders.
Leo, as a younger, new pope, will have to decide how best to frame and present his relationship with Constantipole on both a personal and ecumenical level.
As a new pope and the first American to hold the office, he has the benefit of being a point of global media fascination.
As such, almost anything he does or doesn’t do or say on a trip to Turkey will likely be subject to considerable amplification and perhaps over-interpretation — meaning even small gestures from Leo could go a long way.
But if Leo is overwhelmingly likely to keep the date in Nicea, he hasn’t formally and publicly committed to doing so yet.
The most probable reason for the delay isn’t that the pope is being coy, but rather that he and his state department are mulling a more extended itinerary.
Earlier this month, the Maronite patriarch Cardinal Béchara Boutros Raï told an Arab TV news channel that he expected the pope to visit Lebanon before the year’s end.
“It’s unclear to be honest when [Leo] will visit, but he will visit anytime from now until December,” the cardinal said, while noting nothing was certain until there was a formal Vatican announcement.
As has been noted, Leo has made the issue of global conflict and peace a central theme of his first months as pope — with the pontiff paying particular attention to the Middle East and the war in Gaza.
The Associated Press reports that a posited papal trip to Lebanon by Francis was hampered by security concerns; the country has seen its territory drawn into the conflict as Israeli military strikes continue to target Hezbollah placements in the country’s southern regions.
The same security concerns are still alive now, of course, and will no doubt continue to factor into the Vatican’s decision making, even if local expectation is that Leo will be coming soon.
Though if the pope wanted to think outside of the box and really put himself and his message of peace at the heart of the conflict, he might consider a more dramatic itinerary and press for a visit to Israel and the West Bank, if Gaza itself is a practical impossibility.
Security concerns would be the preeminent objection to the pope attempting a visit to what is in reality a country at war, though many might argue that Israel is probably an easier place to secure the pope’s person during a trip than Lebanon, which is itself not obviously safer than other recent papal destinations like Iraq.
More likely, the most important consideration would be political. It is doubtful that the Israeli government would welcome the pope inviting himself over at this point, though it is by no means certain they would block him from coming if he insisted on trying.
If Leo did decide to make himself a “pilgrim for peace” in the Holy Land in the first months of his pontificate, it could become a defining moment of his reign — and not one without precedent.
Many might draw ready comparisons to Saint John Paul II’s 1979 trip to Poland, which the government there was far from enthusiastic about at the time.
Of course, a Leonine visit to Israel would be in a very different context and likely in hope of change of a very different kind.
While the Vatican has been unsparingly critical of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and local leaders like Cardinal Pier Battista Pizzaballa have been eager to highlight what they see as Israeli state-sponsored persecution of Christians in the West Bank, Israel is already the kind of Western democracy John Paul II helped create out of Communist Poland.
But the underlying lesson of history is that it is possible for a pope to force himself into the center of world affairs and become a catalyst for significant change — though it requires a very particular kind of character of the individual pope.
An alternative approach to papal visits to conflict zones was perhaps modeled by Francis, who famously demurred on repeated invitations to visit Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion and immediately after.
Instead, Francis made it clear he preferred to offer himself as a potential bridge between the two sides, offering by turns occasionally controversial interventions towards both sides and signalling he hoped to visit Kyiv and Moscow in one trip, as a kind of diplomatic crescendo, rather than overture.
Similarly, it was widely understood that the previous pope hoped one day to secure an invitation to visit China, an event which was also conceived to be a kind of grand culmination of the Holy See’s diplomatic efforts with Beijing.
For obvious reasons, assessing the effectiveness of Francis’ vision vs. John Paul’s remains a question of hypotheticals.
But the broader schools of papal diplomatic travel they represent are clear enough: One preferred to impose himself and catalyse events — not necessarily with predictable results — and the other to patiently build towards an invitation made on mutual terms and after certain circumstances were in place.
Leo will have to decide which, if either, of these models he finds more his style, though it is probably worth noting that, at least in some situations his American identity will be a factor.
This is most obviously true of any papal trip — or even public dialogue — with Moscow and Beijing. Leo may be widely perceived apart from the country of his birth by Catholics and (at least it seems for the moment) governments in Western Europe, Africa and Latin America, but his passport of birth is likely to prove an unignorable fact for Russia and China, perhaps even prohibitively so.
Even if those two respective governments did perceive Leo as being (as all popes are in law and hopefully in spirit) totally diplomatically independent, both countries have entrenched nationalist media estates to whom Leo will be perhaps indelibly “American” and therefore suspect.
Ironically, the other country where Leo’s Americaness will likely prove to be the most complicating to a potential papal visit is the U.S. itself. Shortly after Leo’s election, journalists started pouring over Illinois voter registration records for Robert Prevost’s political fingerprints, and virtually anything the pope might say on any aspect of American life will be given an almost breathless political interpretation, however studiously or even explicitly non-partisan it might be.
With the country set to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, many American Catholics will be harboring hopes for a surprise papal visit. That is almost certain not to happen, since any trip “home” for Leo would likely need months of diplomatic negotiations and logistical planning to bring off — none of which are in the works, by any account.
However, America’s own jubilee year will likely prompt some kind of direct address from the first American pope, especially one who took his name from the author of several pointed and perceptive messages to American Catholics.
A letter from Leo next year could set the tone, and its subtext maybe even suggest the terms, for an eventual homecoming visit by the pope.
What seems sure is that where, when, and why the pope goes first could prove a crucial part of the process as Leo begins to shape his pontificate.
