Crossroads Podcast: Of Course Journalists Picked Pope Leo For Newsmaker Of The Year
In the summer of 1982, I joined the Charlotte News (RIP) staff and began my work as a religion writer and columnist. At the end of that year, I wrote a column about the annual Religion Newswriters Association poll to determine the year’s Top 10 religion stories of the year.
It’s safe to say that I have learned quite a bit in the years since then about the events that, decade after decade, appear in this poll. The sponsoring organization is now called the Religion News Association and, instead of one Top 10 list, there are now two — one for events and trends in the United States and the other for the world as a whole. All of this served as the hook for this week’s 2025 “Crossroads” finale.
The bottom line: The pope comes out on top most of the time.
Let me start with something rather strange. Two nights before the 2025 results went public, I had a vivid dream in which I learned the results of this year’s poll. I have had amazing dreams all my adult life, often about column-related issues. I once dreamed the entire syllabus for a Washington Journalism Center class. I got out of bed, wrote it down, and we used that outline for a decade.
That’s what I did the other night with my RNA poll vision. The list I typed into my smartphone at 5 a.m. opened with this: “Leo synodal immigration,” “Trump immigration USCCB [the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops]” and “Charlie Kirk GOP anti-semitism.” Some other items were the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in Australia, the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, the China trial of human-rights activist Jimmy Lai, the Israel-Gaza Donald Trump deal and the trend with young men returning to church, but not young women. I didn’t dream 10 items, for some reason.
This brings us to the top items of the RNA lists for 2025. The domestic news list opened like this:
TIE 1. The election of Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV — the first U.S.-born pontiff — sparks celebration among U.S. Catholics, especially in his native Chicago and at his alma mater, Villanova University. He weighs in on U.S. abortion and immigration politics, drawing both praise and criticism.
TIE 1. Trump administration launches sweeping deportations of immigrants lacking legal status and revokes temporary legal status for many. Catholic bishops and other faith-based groups protest and report parishioners avoiding worship for fear of arrest. The administration ends “sanctuary” protections from immigration enforcement in houses of worship.
3. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk is assassinated at a Utah campus, sparking debate over political violence and free speech. His wife, Erika, publicly forgives the gunman, whom authorities say had leftist motives. Top officials join tens of thousands in a worship-infused memorial service. Many Black pastors are alienated by praise of Kirk.
Here’s the top of the international list:
1. Cardinal Robert Prevost is elected the first U.S.-born pope in a historic conclave, taking the name Leo XIV. He also is a citizen of Peru and worked much of his adult life there as a priest and bishop. He maintains many of predecessor Francis’ priorities, including attention to migrants, the poor, the environment, synodality, youth involvement, and outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics.
2. Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, dies at 88 a day after blessing Easter worshippers, concluding a 12-year papacy in which he charmed many with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change and his relatively tolerant stances toward LGBTQ+ and divorced Catholics.
3. Trump administration cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and AIDS-relief programs reverberate widely across Africa and other regions and prompt outcry from evangelical and liberal charities.
Now, my dream totally missed one key element of the voting by religion-news beat professionals. You can see my mistake clearly in the top results for religion “newsmaker” of the year.
1. Pope Leo XIV, previously Cardinal Robert Prevost, who becomes the first U.S.-born pope and who largely continues the late Pope Francis’ priorities, with vocal support for the poor, migrants, synodality, and the environment.
2. Zohran Mamdani, who is elected New York City’s first Muslim mayor, spurring pride and hope for U.S. Muslims but mixed reactions among Jewish leaders, some alarmed by his rhetoric on Israel, others cheered his support for Palestinians and progressive policies.
To be honest, I assumed that Charlie Kirk would finish second in that contest.
Why? Stop and think about this for a moment. I knew that the pope would win because (a) Catholicism is the world’s largest specific Christian flock and the United States and (b) journalists think of the Vatican as a powerful political institution and, of course, politics is what matters. If there is any link between U.S. politics and a papal statement (or a Vatican action) that story is going to get lots of ink.
Always remember the mantra I used for 20 years with the GetReligion.org project: “Politics is real. Religion? Not so much.” Thus, religion news is important to the degree that it’s connected to politics. Read any RNA.org poll and you will see this. “Ordinary” news about the beliefs, lives, worship and actions of religious believers don’t count for much. That isn’t “real” news.
Thus, the pope is the most “powerful” leader whose work is consistently linked to topics that journalists can frame in political terms.
However, stop and think. In the United States, the largest flock in the American public square (these folks are highly disorganized) are evangelical and Pentecostal Christians (including most of the nondenominational believers), followed by religiously unaffiliated citizens, including the “nones,” “nothing in particulars,” agnostics and atheists. Look for these groups in the 2025 poll.
If you study the poll results, it’s easy to see that there are religious believers doing “good” things and religious believers doing “bad” things.
Most of the time, the pope is a “good guy” who does “good things” and the other “good religion” leaders are linked to liberal mainline churches, progressive Jews and moderate Muslims. In RNA.org polls, look for the term “faith leaders” and you know that you are talking about “good religion” news.
Clearly, in my thinking (and dreaming) about the 2025 RNA poll, I failed to grasp that New York City Mayor Mamdani has now emerged as a powerful leader in the world of “good religion.”
Moving on. Who leads the “bad religion” forces? Right now, there is no doubt that journalists think that’s President Donald Trump, whose name appears 12 times in the 2025 poll press release. The working assumption is that all religious conservatives love Trump, no matter what. Truth be told, many religious conservatives have voted for him because they truly believed they had no other option. But that issue is too complex for most news coverage.
Oh, when does Trump’s name NOT appear in the poll results? Check out this item from the international poll:
4. A U.S.-brokered Israel–Hamas truce takes effect with partial Israeli troop withdrawals and releases of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Flare-ups continue. Gaza authorities report over 69,000 deaths in the war, triggered by Hamas’ deadly 2023 attack on Israel. Israel disputes genocide allegations. Several Western nations recognize a Palestinian state.
In the podcast, I noted another important poll trend that I have seen over the years.
This is quite logical: “Good” religious leaders never (or rarely) do bad things and “bad” religious leaders never (or rarely) do good things. Also, when bad things happen to religious believers, especially those in traditional sanctuaries, it is very hard to discern the motives of the people who committed those often deadly actions.
For example, notice this item in the domestic list (with added italics):
5. Deadly attacks target faith communities. A gunman and arsonist motivated by anti-Mormon hatred kills four at a Latter-day Saints church in Michigan. A former studentkills two children at a Minneapolis Catholic school and injures many more; the assailant “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable,” a prosecutor says.
Did this attack have anything to do with gender confusion and mental-health issues? Apparently not.
Note this tie vote in the international-news poll, with special attention to material inside quotation marks:
TIE 6. President Donald Trump threatens to halt aid to Nigeria and go in “‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists” after accusing its government of failing to protect Christians. U.S. designates it a “country of particular concern” on religious freedom. Nigeria denies the claim, though it pledges increased anti-terror operations.
TIE 6. Violence escalates against religious minorities in Syria, now governed by a group claiming to have renounced Al Qaeda ties. Alawite, Christian, and Druze communities report deadly attacks, including a church bombing in Damascus that kills at least 25. Monitoring groups warn that Alawite and other minorities are at risk of genocide-level violence.
The slaughter of Christians in Nigeria has been going on for a decade while receiving little coverage in elite U.S. media. There is little question that the attackers are linked to the Islamic State and other radicalized forms of Islam.
Yes, many of these attacks focus on Christians. But note the complex reality I included in this passage from a recent “On Religion” column:
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has, in so many words, called the reports of persecution and genocide fake news. These claims “do not reflect our national reality,” he said, responding to the news from Washington. Nigeria’s population is divided almost exactly 50-50 between Muslims and Christians and, he stressed, the nation “opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it. … Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so.”
Nigerian authorities have consistently argued that the bloodshed is not driven by religion, but by clashes between farmers and herders fighting for control of land and water, due to climate change and other economic forces. Violence has stained Nigeria for decades and radical Islamists have destroyed at least 18,000 churches in Nigeria and have murdered more than 50,000 Christians, according to a 2023 Vatican report based on research from the Nigeria-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, also known as Intersociety. Fulani forces kill moderate Muslims as well, with an estimated 34,000 dead since 2009.
In other words, radicalized Muslims are massacring Christians AS WELL as Muslims who do not accept the form of Islam that radicals are spreading, primarily with guns and machetes. Journalists need to be covering both sides of this bloodshed.
Will things be different next year? That depends on whether Pope Leo XIV says anything that can be interpreted in ways that will affect the 2026 U.S. elections.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
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.