Pope Leo Brings More than Linguistic Gifts. He Has Cultural Fluency.

In 2016, I was working with a team in the Vatican to put Pope Francis on Instagram. I made the case that simplicity was key and that we should therefore provide captions in just three languages: Italian, English and Spanish. I lost the argument, and @franciscus debuted in nine languages. But English, Spanish and Italian led the list.

With the election of Pope Leo — someone who not only speaks those three languages fluently but knows well the cultures behind them — I feel like I’ve won. They’re the three most important languages in the Roman Catholic Church today. Because language reflects culture, Leo’s linguistic gifts could help him make a mark on the governance of the church both globally and in the Vatican.

Leo was born in the middle of America and attended school on the South Side of Chicago, but his two decades as a missionary and bishop in Peru and a church official in Rome allowed him to embrace both Italian and Hispanic cultures as well. You can view the new pope as either not very American, or the very best that America has to offer — someone who made a sacrifice as a missionary to serve in a country much poorer than his own, embracing the culture and loving his new neighbors.

Leo is the first native English speaker to ascend the throne of Peter in nearly 900 years, after Adrian IV in the 12th century. Unlike during the Middle Ages, he does it at a time when Anglophone culture dominates global communications, finance, technology and the arts. English is the new Latin, the language of the Empire of the Internet.

Italian to my ears is the most beautiful of the new pope’s languages, and knowing it helps so much in understanding — and loving — Italy. But it can also be confusing. Leave it to Italian politicians to give us the concept of “convergenze parallele,” or “parallel convergences,” to describe how opposing political parties can accommodate each other’s position.

Though only a tiny percentage of Catholics speak Italian, it’s the language of the Vatican and necessary for the pontiff to communicate with his collaborators. Italian is also essential in understanding how things work (and often don’t) in the Roman Curia, or Vatican bureaucracy.