Canadian Indigenous and religious leaders are optimistic about the new Pope, Leo XIV, who has lived and worked with Indigenous people in Peru and signalled a commitment to the Catholic traditions of social teaching and engagement with the world.
“I’m definitely hopeful,” Deacon Harry Lafond, Cree elder and scholar in Indigenous education at Saskatoon’s St. Thomas More College, told Canadian Affairs.
The selection of Robert Prevost, a 69-year-old American Augustinian friar and missionary, as pope came as a surprise to many, including Lafond.
“I want to listen to him very closely for the next year to get a sense of where he’s coming from and where he wants us to go with him. There’s some really big items he’s inherited. One of them is synodality,” Lafond said, referring to a process of listening and dialogue on the culture of the Church.
“I want to know, is he willing to speak to the Canadian Indigenous people directly? I think that’s important. We started out on a good footing here with Pope Francis. We don’t want to lose ground. We need to keep exploring that renewed relationship.”
Graydon Nicholas, of the Tobique First Nation and chancellor of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B., is betting on the new Pope’s Peruvian experience to continue progress made under Pope Francis.
“If he had asked me what is your advice, I would say, ‘Meet with Indigenous people wherever he goes. Indigenous people around the world face the same struggle with the effects of colonialism,” said Nicholas, who was the first Indigenous person to serve as Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick.
Nicholas is also hoping the new Pope continues what Pope Francis began with the 2015 encyclical Laudato Sí, a papal letter on climate change. The letter committed the Catholic Church to caring for the environment.
“Pope Francis spoke about respecting mother earth, not as a deity, but in fact what God created,” said Nicholas.
Regina Archbishop Don Bolen is just as encouraged about the Church’s prospects for continuing reconciliation with Indigenous people under Pope Leo XIV.
“I am hope filled in that regard,” Bolen said. “[Leo XIV] is well respected by the Latin American Church. And the Latin American Church is committed to justice, it’s committed to the environment, it’s committed to addressing the destruction in the Amazon.”
Bolen said there was something for every Catholic — and all people of good will — in Pope Leo’s brief remarks from the balcony above St. Peter’s Square on Thursday.
“There were a lot of hopeful signs in what he said. What did he talk about? The love of God, the peace that the risen Lord brings, the call for us to work for peace and justice,” said Bolen.
You don’t have to be Catholic to feel something special is happening at the election of a new Pope, said Peter Noteboom, general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches and a commissioned pastor in the Christian Reformed Church in North America.
Noteboom noted the significance of the name Leo, which connects the new Pope to the founding document of Catholic social teaching, Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891 in support of the rights and dignity of workers.
“To the extent that he stays in that tradition and he expresses that tradition, also through his leadership of the Augustinian order, you know that’s promising,” Noteboom said. “I think the whole globe is [watching the new Pope]. Protestants will. Orthodox folks will. Evangelicals will. It’s true that the Bishop of Rome catches the eye of everyone. So people will definitely be looking to see how he carries forward that heritage.”
One of the few people not entirely surprised by the election of Pope Leo was Canada’s leading ecumenical theologian, Catherine Clifford of Saint Paul University in Ottawa.
“People will think me a little bit nerdy, but Prevost was on my list,” Clifford said. “I wasn’t sure that the cardinals would be free enough to choose an American-born cardinal. But I think that given where we are as a church and trying to reconcile some of the tensions present in the College of Cardinals … I think his profile is one that obviously it was able to get behind. The two-thirds were able to coalesce very quickly. For balance, that’s a very good sign.”
On Indigenous reconciliation and other cultural issues, Clifford predicts that Leo could be a good Pope for Canada.
“He certainly understands North American culture. I know we are different in Canada. But there is still a convergence of cultures there that he could recognize,” she said.
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