We have a new pope, and he is an American of mixed-race background. If we throw in the fact that he holds dual citizenship (US and Peru), and that he is the first pope to be a member of the Augustinian Order — to which Martin Luther also belonged — we have an impressive number of novelties. On top of that, he is seventy and said to be in good health; his reign may be a relatively long one.

It occurs to me, however, that Robert Prevost’s choice of the name Leo XIV suggests that these incidentals may be the limit of the “change” with which history associates him. The last Leo, Leo XIII (1878-1903), is known for his encyclical letter, De rerum novarum, 1891, which called upon governments and capitalists to do more to protect workers from immiseration, while at the same time rejecting socialism as an interference with Catholic teaching on the family. As an exhortation, De rerum Novarum may be very fine, but it is no kind of call to action. It is, rather, a call to conscience, and as such a ratification of well-established ideas of Christian charity.

We can infer from this, I think, that Leo XIV will not significantly alter the Church’s positions on ordination, matrimony (divorce), or the run of non-procreative sexual acts. It is not clear that, outside the liberal West, anybody wants him to.

Perhaps more important than these doctrinal issues, however, is the structural one of papal authority. To be sure, the head of a church that professes universality and catholicism must speak with the same voice to all members. The question might be this: need he speak so often and so much? Must his be the only voice?

The history of the Church over the past millennium shows us a religious body that until recently rested on territorial power and the taxation that goes with it. Until 1870, the pope was the temporal head of a medium-sized sovereignty, known to us as the Papal States, extending through the center of the Italian peninsula. As such the pope’s territorial domain was one of the dozen or so significant states of Europe, and by the year 1100, it was ahead of all the others in centralized organization that enabled it to make the most of its resources. The effectiveness, or efficiency of church government with respect to land readily lent itself to the prosecution of doctrinal matters: it is not an accident that Europe’s first law school was established at about this time at the papal sub-capital of Bologna. Procedurally, the law of land ownership provided a template for the law of professed belief. They might be complicated, but they were stable, even routine. The pope was a dual autocrat, requiring no one else’s blessing to proceed temporally or spiritually.

The pope’s spiritual autocracy did not go unchallenged, most notably by the Conciliar Movement of the early Fifteenth Century, which, however, failed so signally that the one event most generally remembered about its climactic event, the Council of Constance, is the burning of Jan Hus, despite Imperial safe-conducts. In the middle of the next century, the Council of Trent was intended to bring together at least the more respectable voices calling for Church Reform, but Protestants declined to appear, lest they suffer the fate of Hus.

Against the background of the collapse in 1789 of the ancien régime ethos, which however persisted in Rome into our own time, the truly global extent of today’s Church has renewed the call for councils, to organize the debates of leaders from throughout the world without obliging the pope to pronounce on their every claim. There is certainly reason to suspect that the election of Jose Mario Bergoglio as the last pope, was inspired by the desirability of detaching the church’s operations from the remnant of Italian secular power that lurks in the Vatican bureaucracy. There is all the stronger reason to suspect similar intentions behind the election of Robert Prevost as the new one. It is expected that Leo XIV will continue the work of Francis’s Synod of Synodality.

The overarching obligation of the worldly Church — “from the bishops to the last of the faithful” — is to articulate the sensum fidelium, “a universal consent in matters of faith and morals.” It may be that this comprehensive clarity will be better attained by a polyphonic choir than by the unison of plain chant.

During a time of transformation such as ours, it is usually helpful to say as little as possible at any one move — and so to keep commitments to the future to a minimum. We cannot learn from what we our doing if our plans are so worked out that they can teach us nothing that we don’t know.