Leo XIV and a leadership beyond polarization - …
When, yesterday morning, Leo XIV appeared at the entrance of the Hall of Benedictions, everyone noticed his usual cheerful and serene expression, and that boisterous laugh exchanged with his collaborators: a detail that, even before any words were spoken, helped ease the atmosphere among the curial officials. Prevost consistently comes across as a man of joy: smiling, luminous, inwardly free from that gloomy, guarded posture - almost permanently on alert - that in other times was mistaken for a mark of authority. His demeanor is not naïveté; it is a form of non-aggressive confidence, capable of putting others at ease without lowering, by even a millimeter, the measure of his role.
Yes, Leo XIV ascends the throne prepared by ceremonial protocol. But he inhabits it in an unusual way: with the posture of someone who draws near, not of one who places himself above in order to preside from a distance. This is the subtle yet decisive difference between power that displays itself and authority that allows itself to be approached. From the very first days of his pontificate, Leo has shown an ability to be at ease everywhere: at lunch with the poor of Caritas, within diplomatic protocol, in dialogue with priests, in closeness to the laity, with religious women, with non-Catholics. He does not change language to seduce an audience; he changes register in order to respect his interlocutor.
There is, in this style, a further hallmark: Leo wears what is given to him with humility, with a calm that speaks of trust. For him, reliance is not humiliation; it is an act of realism, the awareness that the Church lives by relationships, not by suspicion. And precisely this unsettles part of the media narrative: because it defuses the story of permanent conflict, while generating peace and serenity, not only within the Leonine walls. For thirteen years, by contrast, an idea took hold that authority had to present itself with a harsh face, an angry tone, an almost structurally inquisitorial cadence; that any appeal to the form of the papacy was a relic to be discarded; that severity guaranteed authenticity. Over time, the results became plain to see: fatigue, closure, resentment, a sense of perpetual judgment that rarely produces conversion and far more often produces rigidity.
Today, Leo XIV embodies an idea of a Church that goes forth - open, welcoming - without attempting to erase what came before. He does not disown, ridicule, or sever the continuity of these two thousand years. And here Italian journalists struggle: because a Pope who combines gentleness and authority, who denounces distortions without raising his voice or theatricalizing condemnation, is harder to turn into a headline. Yet it is precisely this firm gentleness that today makes his language more credible and his presence more readily received. In recent years, part of the press found all too fertile ground in crafting punitive headlines against clergy and institution: the operation succeeded easily, because the Pope himself adopted a percussive register, and reporters merely had to engage in a mechanical copy-and-paste of tone and wording.
In the 2014 Christmas address, Francis framed his intervention as a public diagnosis: a list of “diseases” and temptations, a deliberately abrasive lexicon, intended to shake and expose internal dynamics. That language, however, proved ineffective precisely for those who should have allowed themselves to be challenged unto conversion, while functioning perfectly as raw material for media narration. Over the years, the repetition of a corrective and punitive register - often lacking the restraint required by the delicacy of the role - shifted the overall effect: instead of generating lasting improvement, it consolidated a climate of withdrawal, anger, and defensive identity...
...It is necessary to pause on media narration. In these hours, many Italian headlines have reproduced - almost without deviation - schemes and tones inherited from the previous season: polarization, dramatization, a lexicon of confrontation. It is a consolidated automatism: for years, the scene was read through the narrative pair of a Pope who “scolds” and a Curia that “takes it”. Today the Pontiff has changed, but the interpretive grid has remained the same. The critical point is that this grid, through repetition, becomes manipulative: instead of recounting the event, it forces it into a format designed to capture attention and generate clicks. When the raw material - the actual tone of the address - offers no hooks for the “big headline,” a kind of rewriting intervenes: passages of denunciation are isolated and magnified, context is thinned out, and a harshness is attributed that in fact belonged to a very different register...
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