Making sense of the Leonine pontificate: An interview with Christopher R. Altieri

“To understand the depth of the issues and why Leo might be the perfect man for the job,” said Ken Craycraft in his CWR review of Christopher R. Altieri’s new book, Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform (2025, Bloomsbury Continuum), “the reader can do no better than to take up and read Christopher Altieri’s insightful and engaging book.”

“Chris Altieri offers more than insight into the background and thinking of Pope Leo XIV, as important as that is,” said author and CWR contributor Amy Welborn.

“In lucid, balanced prose,” Welborn said, “[Altieri] provides a cogent, honest, wise analysis of the situation of the Church in this present moment in a way that few other authors are managing right now.”

Altieri’s analysis, she said, is “grounded in the historical, theological and spiritual realities of the Church as it is and as it is called to be in this broken world, so needful of the Gospel, clearly proclaimed and confidently—and competently—shared.”

John L. Allen Jr. of Crux, where Altieri is Senior Editor for News and Affairs, praised Altieri as “a provocative and passionate writer, with views forged by decades of experience and a deeply original intelligence.”

“He’s never been better than he is here,” Allen said, “as he plumbs the early promise of the papacy of Leo XIV, from the tri-cultural character of the new pope’s formation to his roots in a distinctly Augustinian spirituality.”

“While it’s all compelling,” Allen said, Altieri is especially to be read on the looming challenges of institutional reform—which, as ever, is where the rubber truly meets the road.”

“This is essential reading,” Allen said, “not only on the pope but on the Church in our times.”

Long-time readers of CWR should not be surprised by such assessments, as Altieri’s informed and careful analysis has appeared regularly in these pages over many years, couched in lively prose conveying sober judgment.

CWR spoke with the author recently.

CWR: Writing and publishing books about rapidly changing current events is a challenge. What are the basic strokes of how this book came about following the election of Pope Leo XIV?

Christopher Altieri: Well, without saying too much, Dominic Mattos of Bloomsbury Continuum approached me in May—we have a mutual friend who made introductions—and asked whether I would be able to write something in the way of biography, on a very tight production schedule. If memory serves, I countered with the suggestion of something biography-adjacent, which would point toward the need for a full biography of the man in the office, but focusing itself on the office and the circumstances of the Church into which the new man—Leo XIV, it happens—had come.

I felt—I knew—I had no shortage of useful things to say about that latter subject. Indeed, I had said many of them, piecemeal, over the years—and decades—in this job. The challenge, for me, was to pull them together and then to see for myself what I really thought of the situation broadly and generally, without losing sight of the particulars.

If I may put it this way: I felt a little like the plumber you call after giving yourself a headache trying to DIY a persnickety bit of home repair. He comes in, pokes around a little bit, bangs on something or other, makes two turns with his wrench that fix the problem, and sends you a bill for $1000.

You’re not paying for the fifteen minutes he spent on your issue. You’re paying for the decades of experience that gave him the wherewithal to come in and solve it for you in fifteen minutes, without tearing out walls and pipes.

Now, the big difference between me and the plumber is that I don’t actually fix anything. I only share my view of the papal office and of the Church in this historical moment, one view that is—I hope—informed and clear-eyed.

CWR: So, what is the state of the papacy in 2025, and what are the biggest challenges faced by the new pontiff?

Christopher Altieri: Mrs. Altieri would be very sore with me if I answered that fully—she wants folks to have to buy the book—but I can say this: It seems to me that the papal office itself has developed over the course of the past century, and especially in the rough half-century since Pope St. John Paul II came into it, from a Roman office with universal jurisdiction to a global office centered in Rome.

Only a little more specifically, the challenges facing the pope—whoever he is or may be—in the middle of the 21st century are primarily problems of governance.

I do not think we are used to thinking of the papacy—the papal office—as an office of government. I’ve said elsewhere, probably in the pages of CWR, that doctrine is important in an “Is the earth still orbiting the Sun?” sort of way, while governance is concerned with whether the house is sound. In the great scheme of things, it is far more important that Earth continue to orbit the Sun.

Doctrine has a way of taking care of itself—a long and frequently, even invariably messy way, but a way—but if the house needs maintenance and frequent repair, especially if it is a big old house. If the house is on fire, Earth’s regular orbit will not put the fire out.

One way to understand the dogma of indefectibility and that of infallibility is as a guarantee that it will, even despite the very best efforts of clerics from the pope to the last parish curate.

Here too, however, the business is complicated by the ineluctable fact that matters of doctrine and matters of governance are wrapped up with one another.

CWR: Almost no one thought Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost OSA could or would be elected pope. Looking back, as you do in the book, should that reasonable assumption have been qualified and his odds shortened? Why do you think he was elected?

Christopher Altieri: His election certainly surprised me. I talk about my real-time reaction to the news in the book. I was live-to-air when it happened. In fairness to everyone who discounted him, though, the man who became Leo XIV gave himself impossible odds heading into the conclave, too, and for much the same reason those of us who discounted him did: The cardinals would not elect anyone from the US.

While I was recovering from the shock—it began almost as soon as I recognized his name and continued as I waited to return to air—I realized how well he fit the profile of the fellow for whom I thought the cardinals would be looking. I know I wrote about that profile with CWR readers. Basically: An institutionalist who isn’t a cog in the Roman machine, someone with knowledge of the Church’s international role and global footprint who is not a career diplomat, a fellow with stage presence—the ability to carry an audience in several languages—but who does not crave the limelight and who would be willing to stay home and govern, and—finally—someone whose leadership record on clerical abuse and coverup could sustain almost immediate and searing public scrutiny.

On that last point, especially, the man we now call Leo XIV had weathered a couple of major storms. His skeletons were out of the closet, in other words. That was the best for which the group in the Sistine could reasonably aspire, I think.

As I read and thought and spoke with people, it became clear to me how his Augustinian spiritual formation and his time in global leadership of his Order of Saint Augustine both contributed to his profile, as did his training and experience as a canon lawyer.

I could say much more, but I don’t want to give away the store.

CWR: You are especially interested in how Leo’s Augustinian background will guide and focus his governance. How do you think that will look and work?

Christopher Altieri: I really want to know, too. I had a piece in Crux recently, in which I said that we would only really enter the “Leonine” era after the extraordinary consistory on January 7-8 of the new year.

That said, I think the keys to understanding him will be his thoroughly Augustinian anthropology, already evident in his speeches and homilies, and in his equally Augustinian sense of history as a mode of consciousness, an attitude of the soul, and, when it is infused with the theological virtue of hope, an aptitude of the spirit.

CWR: The rapid rise of AI and related technological changes has been remarked upon several times already by Leo. What sort of background and experience—theological and pastoral, especially—does he bring to the topic? And how important will this be for his pontificate and for the Church?

Christopher Altieri: It will be crucial, indeed, one of the measures by which the success or failure of his pontificate will be gauged. If I have my man, however, Leo will work to leverage what Pope St. Paul VI called the Church’s “expert[ise] in humanity”—the profound and perduring anthropological insights of which the Church is custodian and carrier—and to bring that expertise to bear on the social and civilization disruption we are all experiencing

I expect him to try to do that in a way that recovers and retrieves a coherent notion of nature—especially and particularly of human nature—and to articulate it in terms accessible to persons in the 21st century.

It is a tall order.

CWR: You examine in detail the financial challenges (and scandals) in the Vatican. Leo has remarked that there is work to do on financial reform, but he has discouraged apocalyptic rhetoric around the state of Vatican finances. What do you make of his approach to what has been a crisis for quite some time now?

Christopher Altieri: One really interesting—and possibly telling—thing Leo did in the first months of his pontificate was to reverse a 2022 decision of Pope Francis, who had ordered all curial offices to move investment funds to the Institute for the Works of Religion, the IOR or “Vatican Bank” as it is commonly known. Leo rescinded the order and once again permitted curial departments to use institutions outside the Vatican for investment activities.

There was little in the way of explanation from official channels, but the fact of the reversal was news in itself and showed a leader willing to part ways with his predecessor on such matters.

If I may return, just a little, to your earlier question about Leo’s Augustinian experience and formation—here I mean specifically his formation in the Order of Saint Augustine—it is noteworthy that his two terms in the global leadership of his Order exposed him to the challenges of limitless demands on all sorts of resources in conditions of perpetual scarcity.

Managing the tensions that such circumstances inevitably engender always requires both ruthless mission discipline and real human sensibility.

CWR: You worked in the Vatican communication apparatus for many years, and you also know it well as a journalist. The problems with Vatican communications, you argue, are structural and cultural. Can you remark on both?

Christopher Altieri: I almost said, “Happily,” because I nurture fond memories of my Vatican service—more than a dozen years of it at Vatican Radio and, at the tail end of my time, in the Secretariat (now Dicastery) for Communications—and I continue to be in awe of the competence and downright grit of many professionals who work in the Vatican’s comms apparatus.

To be frank, however, it is something of a sore subject for me.

Those professionals are hamstrung by a siloed system that does not understand their work or even try to understand it, often as not, and are frequently stymied by principals formed in a top-down leadership culture that literally does not know how to rely on the knowledge and experience of its own people. Curial culture produces senior leaders who ignore advice and in fact frequently do not ask for it. Curial culture discourages and sometimes actively punishes initiative.

For what it’s worth, I think Pope Francis understood this facet of the problem very well.

G.K. Chesterton has a line somewhere, about the reformer always being right about what is wrong, and generally wrong about what is right.

That line comes to mind in this context.

Francis’s solution—not only insofar as Vatican communications are concerned—was to govern largely without his curia.

I do not know whether Leo will be able to make much—or any—headway in these regards. My crystal ball is on the fritz. That said, I do think he understands instinctively or intuitively that repair of the Vatican’s communications culture specifically is mission-critical, and for one very straightforward reason: The Church’s whole purpose is to communicate the Good News of salvation to the world.

CWR: From our work together at CWR, I know how central good governance and authentic justice are when it comes to the Vatican, and both are discussed often in your book. Can you share with readers some of your more specific thoughts and observations on both, and discuss how they are related (or should be) in the reality of Vatican affairs?

Christopher Altieri: Now, you’re tempting me, Carl. You and I could go for hours on this—we have gone for hours on this—but for now, I will resist the temptation, and invite readers to get the book.

I will say this, though, just a taste of the sort of thing they’ll find when they do, an idea readers of CWR will recognize as one I have often discussed: Catholics have a right to good government. They have a right to knowledge of the character and conduct of their rulers in the faith. They have a right to know how their money is being spent, and to know what churchmen charged with the conduct of justice—a public good—are doing in the name of God and His holy people, the Church.

If people cannot trust clerical and hierarchical leaders to tell the truth about such relatively minor things as what they’re doing with people’s money, or with more important things like the administration of justice, then people cannot trust clerical and hierarchical leaders when they tell them that God took human flesh and died for our sins and rose from the dead to draw us into the very inner life of His divine Trinity.

I do not think it is moon-eyed for people to expect that the pope and the Vatican should strive to lead by example in these regards.

That said, the Church is a power structure—at least, she has a power structure—and where there is power, there will be abuse of it.

The work of journalists—if I may use a baseball metaphor—is not so much to call balls and strikes as though scribblers were umpires. The work is to call the game, sometimes like a play-by-play announcer and sometimes as an in-studio game analyst. Color commentators have a place and a role in this, too, but there is no following the game if their voices are all you have to go on.

CWR: Without trying to don any prophetic work wear, what do you think we might see in Leo’s pontificate in the next few years?

Christopher Altieri: I think I mentioned my crystal ball being fritzy, so, let me hedge a little with this while I try to give you an answer worth the name.

Basically, I expect the Leonine pontificate to be a work of consolidation and absorption—to say it with terms borrowed from the great veteran Vaticanista, Andrea Gagliarducci, who is a dear old friend as well as a fellow scribbler.

I know that many people have been hoping the new pope would act with great alacrity to reverse some of his immediate predecessor’s measures. That has not happened, and I can’t say I am surprised it hasn’t happened. I always thought people nourishing those hopes were bound to be disappointed.

Almost as soon as I knew the cardinals had elected Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, however, I knew that the folks hoping for perfect continuity with Pope Francis were going to have a hard time, too, and even that they were going to have the harder time of it.

Exactly how Leo will go about that work, and how well, remains almost entirely to be seen.

The strength of my book, if I may say so myself, is in offering a view of what the work really is, hence what it will necessarily entail, and about why the cardinals looked to Leo as the man to whom they would entrust the moment.

I have tried, in other words, to capture and bring into hard focus the real circumstances of the Church Leo XIV must govern and of the world in which he must govern her, situating that view within the scope of recent events, while also embracing the sweep of history that sees the Church as at once militant and peregrine, on her way to eternity.

CWR: Any final thoughts?

Christopher Altieri: Only to say how grateful I am to CWR and to you, not only for the opportunity to talk about my book, but also—especially—for the opportunity to contribute to these pages over the years, and to say how fondly I hope to be a part of this work in the new Leonine era.