Future Leo XIV Offered Warnings On Screens Culture
(ANALYSIS) Dear Protestant readers of Rational Sheep (and those in other non-Tiber tribes):
Hang on. The global media storm surrounding the election of Pope Leo XIV will soon fade to some degree (until he wears a Chicago White Sox jersey or something like that).
This post centers on the fact that the priest and bishop who is now pope has, in the past, offered some strong, insightful appeals for church leaders to face the realities of the digital age.
For starters, there is the issue of this pope’s choice of a name. In his first public address to the College of Cardinals he noted:
… I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
In terms of mainstream news coverage, the obvious topics for early coverage are “Who is this guy?” and “How did he get elected?” Once again, I urge readers — in all pews — to head to Catholic news sources, left of center and to the right of center, to find reporting that digs deeper than political metaphors.
Personally, I thought that this summary at the Rorate Caeli ("Drop down, O heavens") website was fascinating. This provocative paragraph, at a website frequented by pro-Catechism Catholics, is backed by interesting references to online research (and a few claims of insider contacts).
Robert Francis Prevost has become Pope Leo XIV. Before May 8, 2025, most people did not know the name Prevost, but now he is the chief shepherd of over a billion Catholics. Both orthodox Catholics and modernists have been celebrating, while there have been naysayers on both sides, too. This reflects the fact Prevost was touted as a ‘compromise candidate’ and pushed by strong prelates on both sides. Both the orthodox and the modernists seem to think, or hope, that the new Pope actually leans more in their direction, with orthodox faithful especially being optimistic after his more traditional choice of papal attire and his orthodox first papal mass. So, to put it crudely, the real question is: who got played?
I am, as always, more interested in information about Catholic debates on doctrine than I am in elite media speculations about how the new pope may weaken the global clout of one Donald Trump (Hello, New York Times).
Obviously, I want to know if Pope Leo XIV, while talking about the digital age, asks his bishops to address the impact of screens culture in Catholic homes. Will the pope express concerns about smartphones and tablets in Catholic schools and, yes, churches?
To read the rest of Terry Mattingly’s post, please visit his Substack page at Rational Sheep.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.