When white smoke rose over the Vatican. A dispatch from Rome, where Robert Francis Prevost addressed the crowd for the first time as Leo XIV, the only Pope to have been born in America. Plus:

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Paul Elie
Reporting from Rome

A message comes via WhatsApp: “white smoke.” And then the bells start to ring—the bells of the churches of Rome’s centro storico, their different timbres and tempi mingled in with car horns and sirens. It’s as if the bells are tolling one another into action, a collective sound at once ancient, impersonal, and deeply affecting.

I am up among the bells, on a rooftop near the Piazza Farnese. Today, over at the Vatican, the branded, event-television aspect of the conclave is on full display: pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square and reporters in the press room alike watching the giant screens showing the “fumata cam” (the streaming video of the smokestack atop the Sistine Chapel). When the smoke came this morning—it was black—the watchers took photos of a picture beamed in from a few hundred feet away. The rooftops adjacent to St. Peter’s are occupied by TV crews or are being rented for five hundred euros a day; I chose this rooftop, among the bells of Rome, so as to hear their tolling—the least mediated, most local aspect of this whole affair.

And now the bell is tolling in the cupola of the church building whose roof I am on. Habemus papam: Latin for “we have a Pope.” O.K., but which Pope do we have?

The first answer comes about an hour later, via video beamed round the world: the new Pope is Robert Francis Prevost, an American, Chicago-born, a member of the Augustinian order, who spent much of his life as a missionary in Peru and was tapped by Pope Francis in January, 2023, to lead the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, where he supervised the appointments of a number of the men who will carry forward Francis’s legacy of openness. At age sixty-nine, he may be Pope for the next quarter century.

And then he comes onto the balcony as Pope Leo XIV: trim, tanned, executive-grade in appearance. “Peace be with you,” he says to the crowd, in Italian; he threads variations on peace—in the Church, among religions—through the remarks (read from a printed page, partly in Spanish) with which he introduces himself.

Let’s face it: for all that has been said and written and broadcast about Prevost—he was on the media shortlist for most of the past week—Leo XIV is a complete unknown. Such is the transformative effect of the papacy in the mass-media era: a man’s life and role change radically in a matter of minutes, as he goes from being an Eminenza (the honorific for cardinals, used as a greeting) to a global celebrity, absolute monarch, and wise man rolled into one. So it was for Angelo Roncalli, the peasant-born patriarch of Venice who was lionized by the newsweeklies as “Good Pope John” XXIII. So it was for Karol Wojtyła, who came out from behind the Iron Curtain and into the sports stadiums of the world as Pope John Paul II. And so it was for Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was thought to be dour, neoconservative, and too old—but who enchanted so many of us as Pope Francis, surprising the world with his ebullience and persuasive power.

Today, we have a Pope. We know his given name, his background and achievements, and of course his nationality, which is sure to be the preoccupation of the commentariat in the days to come. But only now—beginning right now—will Catholics and the world find out who he is.

For more: read Elie on how the Pope’s role has changed in our time.