Leo XIV and the challenge of the catholic reform

Sobre el libro Leo XIV and the challenge of the catholic reform de Christopher Altieri publicado por Bloomsbury al 2025:

When Robert Francis Prevost OSA appeared on the loggia of St. Peter’s on 8th May 2025 as Pope Leo XIV it surprised the world. The first American pope. A quiet man few had heard of, following the legacy of one most media savvy pontiffs in history. With subtle gestures – such as wearing the papal mozzetta, and moving back into the Apostolic Palace (far less convenient for him, far less inconvenient for staff and finances) – Pope Leo has shown that, whilst he is in continuity with Francis, he is also a bridge-builder, a man willing to unite the factions in a deeply divided Church that faces challenges of an epochal nature. Pope Leo inherits the governance of a church that is barely solvent, where judicial process has become haphazard and inconsistent, and which is still struggling to face up to a crisis of abuse more than a century in the making at a time when the world is asking big questions about what it means to be human in a complex ethical world of AI and global conflict. Veteran Vatican-watcher Christopher R. Altieri looks at the politics and issues surrounding the conclave of 2025, Prevost’s life and work in Chicago and Peru, alongside his choice of papal name, and the defining skills that lead the Cardinals to select him as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Altieri then also looks at the Church that Leo must run, examining the major challenges and deep-rooted problems he will face in governing a Vatican that is rife with corruption and mismanagement, with financial scandal and lack of juridical transparency, asking how Catholic can be expected to trust the Church in matters of spirituality if it cannot be trusted in financial matters or to deliver justice. Pope Leo emerges as a quiet man of true humility, with a track record as an efficient administrator and conciliatory figure, whose background in Canon Law might just offer him – on paper at least – the skills needed to govern and reshape the Church in modernity.