Lay Catholics Expected to Retain Big Role in Pope Leo XIV’s Church

In the fall of 2024, the cardinal who is now Pope Leo XIV sat at a large round table inside the Vatican, discussing the challenges that face the Roman Catholic Church with a cardinal from Ethiopia, archbishops from Cameroon and Kenya, a cardinal posted to Mongolia, and bishops from Texas and Liberia.

Joining them at the table were a Catholic podcaster from Dallas; a business consultant from Melbourne, Australia; a university administrator from Fiji; and a parishioner from Myanmar, three of whom were women.

Each person at the table, clergy or layperson, was allowed three minutes of uninterrupted speech.

“Every voice had equal value,” said Susan Pascoe, the business consultant, who is chair of Catholic Emergency Relief Australia. She sat at a table with the future pope for the meetings, which often stretched to 11 hours or more a day during four weeks in Rome.

Pope Francis dropped by to listen in, leading another meeting attendee, Wyatt Olivas, a college student from Wyoming, to refer to the pontiff as his “bestie in Christ.”

When Pope Leo XIV stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday and gave his first address as pontiff, he indicated that he would continue this practice of listening closely to many voices.

He called for a “synodal church,” referencing the process of dialogue between church leaders and lay people that was one of Pope Francis’s signature legacies.

Francis, in seeking to democratize the church, opened summits of bishops to lay people, including women, who in 2023 were permitted to vote for the first time about what issues the church should address.

Francis did not want church policies to be decided only by bishops in closed rooms. He wanted to open the doors to all Catholics.

That the new pope decided to mention the concept at all in his first address was significant, said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit writer and well-known proponent of outreach to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics. Inviting lay people to sit as equals with bishops was one of Pope Francis’s contentious moves.

“So a cardinal archbishop from an ancient diocese had to listen to a 20-year-old college student from Philadelphia, and that is quite threatening to some people,” said Father Martin. “It’s really important that Pope Leo has embraced that.”

Mr. Olivas, a 21-year-old Sunday school teacher and junior at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, was first invited to a meeting in Rome in 2023, when he was 19.

At first, he said, he wondered if any of the church leaders, particularly the high-ranking cardinals, would take him seriously. But as the meetings began, with strict rules of engagement requiring everyone to listen while others spoke, the appearance of hierarchy broke down.

“These cardinals who typically sit on their thrones,” Mr. Olivas said, “for them to sit equally with a 19-year-old and listen to me” made him feel like “we’re all in this together.”

At the meetings during Francis’ papacy, some divisive topics came up, including the ordination of women as Catholic deacons, the requirement of celibacy for priests and the church’s attitude toward same-sex couples. Francis requested that various study groups examine some of the more difficult issues and compile reports, in effect postponing decisions about whether to change church teachings or church law.

Progressives who had high hopes that these listening sessions might lead to tangible shifts in church policy worry that the new pope will continue along a path of “a lot of talk and very little action,” said Miriam Duignan, executive director of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research.

Some conservatives say progressives hijacked the meetings as a way to push their liberal agenda. “Synodality for some people is an ideology,” said Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a conservative cardinal from Germany.

Supporters of the process say that simply bringing lay people into discussions with church leaders enhances a transparency that the church has previously lacked.

“If you look at a country like Australia, which had a five-year inquiry into sexual abuse, the notion of a culture of clericalism was part of the analysis of what needed to be addressed,” Ms. Pascoe said. For too long, she said, the church was organized around a structure where “all authority was vested in one individual of the priest or bishop.”

By forcing church leaders to talk seriously with lay people, she said, the consultations inaugurated by Francis tried to introduce a “responsible approach to living and being in the church.”

For Pope Leo XIV, who worked as a missionary and parish priest in Peru, listening to and living among lay people has long been a key tenet of his leadership style.

In Peru, he served as bishop of a rural diocese and was “living with them, not in a palace but in a simple house,” said the Rev. Gilles Routhier, a professor of theology at Laval University in Quebec and an adviser to the Vatican meetings convened by Francis.

Archbishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Bamenda, Cameroon, who also sat at the same table as the future Pope Leo during the meetings in 2024, said the man who is now pontiff took the sessions very seriously even though he occasionally had to dash out to deal with his day job running the Vatican office that selects and manages bishops globally.

“You could see he appreciated the contribution of everyone, and he also came across as a very good listener,” Archbishop Nkea Fuanya said.

In a conversation recorded last year at a church in Illinois, when he was still a cardinal, the man who is now Pope Leo explained how Francis was “looking for a way to help people understand that the Church is not Father up here on Sunday with a lot of spectators.”

He added, “It does not take away at all the authority, if you will, or the ministry of those who are called to specific services in the church, such as a bishop or a priest. But it does call the best gifts out of each and every one to bring them together.”

It is not yet clear whether Pope Leo will encourage the consultative groups to continue talking about the most sensitive issues facing the church. But those who have participated in the process say it would be hard for him to completely squash those discussions.

Father Martin said that those who had specific pet issues needed to understand that the process was more about “changing the methods by which we would be able to move ahead with some of these issues.”

He added that some of the most commonly raised topics by certain Catholics did not necessarily resonate with the faithful the world over.

“We also heard from people who were much more concerned about migrants and refugees, about poverty, about living in countries where Catholics are minorities” than about ordaining women or supporting the desires of divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, Father Martin said.

“Those are a certain constellation of concerns,” he added. The new pope, he said, “really has to take a much more universal view of the church.”

Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Rome.