Pope Leo XIV’s story begins far from the marble halls of the Vatican, on Chicago’s South Side, where faith was woven into ordinary struggle. Years in Peru hardened his sense of reality but softened his judgment of people; he learned to listen before he spoke, to stand with those the world preferred not to see. That same instinct for closeness now collides with a culture that reads every gesture through a partisan lens.

His critics brand his concern for migrants and the poor as ideology, but to him it is biography: the streets he walked, the families he visited, the languages he learned to speak. The Vatican insists his papacy will not be about American politics, yet America keeps dragging him back in. Between Trump’s cordial congratulations and the online rage machine, Leo XIV faces a brutal test: can a pope still talk about mercy without being claimed—or cancelled—by one side?