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People are communicating all the time, and popes certainly are. Even from their very first moments in office, they reveal things about themselves and how they are likely to reign.
In this video, Jimmy Akin studies the very first moments of the four most recent popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV—and looks at the lessons they are already teaching about themselves before they even speak to the public.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Today, I’m going to tell you about how 4 popes chose to meet the world.
Let’s get into it!
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Introduction
In the early days of a pontificate, people study what a pope does very closely.
And that’s understandable. Not much is typically known about a pope, and so people scrutinize him and what he does very closely early in his reign and try to deduce what this says about him and how he is likely to reign.
After the recent election of Pope Leo XIV, I thought about recent papal elections, and so I decided to look at how the men recently chosen as pope first presented themselves to the world—from their very earliest moments.
I thus looked to find video of them appearing on the loggia in St. Peter’s Square.
We’ll thus be covering the popes from John Paul II forwards.
I tried to find video of John Paul I and previous popes, but I had difficulty finding video of their very first moments, so we’ll stick to the most recent 4 popes.
I think there are some insights—even in their very first moments on the world stage—that can be quite informative.
The Moment a Man Becomes Pope
The basic document governing papal conclaves today was issued by John Paul II in 1996. It’s called Universi Dominici Gregis, which is a Latin phrase meaning “The Lord’s Whole Flock”—since that is what the pope is being elected to lead.
A few parts of it were revised by Pope Benedict XVI, but it’s still the basic document in force.
According to it,
- When the election has canonically taken place, the junior Cardinal Deacon summons into the hall of election the Secretary of the College of Cardinals, the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations, and two Masters of Ceremonies.
Then the Cardinal Dean, or the Cardinal who is first in order and seniority, in the name of the whole College of electors, asks the consent of the one elected in the following words:
Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?
And, as soon as he has received the consent, he asks him:
By what name do you wish to be called?
Then the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations, acting as notary and having as witnesses the two Masters of Ceremonies, draws up a document certifying acceptance by the new Pope and the name taken by him.
So the first question they ask the elected man is “Do you accept your canonical election as supreme pontiff?”
He indicates whether he does or doesn’t.
If he doesn’t, then they have to start over and elect someone else. However, recently all of them have accepted their election.
Now, in order to be pope, a man must be a bishop. The pope is, after all, the bishop of Rome.
If the college of cardinals elected a man who was not yet a bishop—and he accepted his election—they would immediately consecrate him a bishop, and he would be pope from that moment forward.
However, the pope is almost always chosen from the college of cardinals, and almost all of them are already bishops, though there have been a few cardinals who weren’t. So normally the man elected becomes pope the instant he accepts his election.
At this point, we then—very briefly—have a pope who would be known by his birth name.
- So the man we know as John Paul II would have originally been Pope Karol
- The man we know as Benedict XVI would have been Pope Joseph
- The man we know as Francis would have been Pope Jorge
- And the man we know as Leo XIV would have been Pope Robert
This period lasts only a very short time, and it only occurs in private.
The Choice of Papal Name
The reason is that the new pope is immediately asked “By what name do you wish to be called?”
The first decision that a man makes after he has been elected pope is thus what his papal name will be.
And his name is a big part of choosing how he will present himself to the world, so his very first decision as pope is about how he will portray himself to the world.
The custom of popes choosing a new name hasn’t always been with the Church.
Back in 2013—after Pope Benedict resigned—I did a study of the history of papal names, which I published as an ebook called Pope Names.
The first pope to take a new name was elected in A.D. 533. He was a man named Mercurius, and it’s reported he thought it wouldn’t be appropriate for there to be a Pope Mercury leading the Christian world—since Mercury was a Roman god—so he picked the clearly Christian name John.
There had already been a pope with the name John, so Mercurius became known as John II.
In the first thousand years of Church history, a handful of men made similar choices to adopt a new name upon becoming pope, but the custom didn’t take off until the second millennium.
In A.D. 996—just before the year 1000—a man named Bruno was elected to the papacy, and he took the name Gregory, becoming Gregory V. This inaugurated a new period where basically every pope started taking a new name.
There were a few exceptions in the 1500s:
- Julius II, who was elected in 1503,
- Adrian VI, who was elected in 1523, and
- Marcellus II, who was elected in 1555.
Each of them kept their own names, but every other pope in the last 1000 years took a new one.
This custom may be modeled off of how many European monarchs in the Middle Ages took new names when they assumed the throne, so having the pope take a new name made him look more like a king, more authoritative.
If that’s the case, we might expect the custom of popes taking new names to drop away at some point in the third millennium, since kings are not as big a thing today, since popes no longer reign over the papal states, and since popes are emphasizing their role as servant of the servants of God.
The customs is still with us in the present, though, and so each of the 4 most recent popes have chosen a regnal name.
This sometimes requires a bit of thought. Recent conclaves have been very quick—with popes being elected after just 4 or 5 ballots—and that’s enough time for many of the men elected to see which way the wind is blowing and start thinking about what name they would like to take.
However, some have reportedly needed a bit of time to decide.
Choosing Their Specific Names
The first of the popes we’re looking at—John Paul II—did something unusual with his papal name: He chose the name of his immediate predecessor, John Paul I, and that’s rare.
John Paul I had an interesting choice of papal name himself. He took the first double regnal name in Church history, explaining that he wanted to honor both John XXIII and Paul VI.
He also styled himself John Paul the First, which is not customary for the first monarch who bears a name. Normally, they are only called “the First” in hindsight, after someone else has used the same name, but John Paul I wanted to be called “the First” during his reign, and so he was.
He died very suddenly and unexpectedly after just a month, and his successor—John Paul II—took the same name.
This is unusual. There have been 267 popes, and only 7 took predecessor’s name of them have taken the name of their immediate predecessor. So historically, the odds of a pope picking his predecessor’s name is 38 to 1 against or a 2.6% chance of it happening.
When popes do pick the name of their predecessor, it tends to happen in a time of crisis. Of the 11 conclaves that have occurred since the year 1900—or the last 125 years—2 of them involved the new pope picking the name of his predecessor, and both were times of crisis.
In 1939, the newly elected Pius XII picked the name of his predecessor, Pius XI, and this was just as World War II was about to break out.
Things were already very tense in Europe, and by picking the name of his predecessor, Pius XII sent a signal of stability—that he was going to continue in the same vein that Pius XI had.
It also told the Nazis, “Don’t expect me to be any friendlier to you than Pius XI was.”
Now we flash forward to 1978, the Church has just been through the convulsive years that followed Vatican II and the counter-culture “free love” movement in which many young people rebelled against traditional values.
Paul VI had issued his controversial 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae against using birth control in marriage, and the backlash was so strong that he never issued another encyclical for the last 10 years of his reign.
Then John Paul I was elected, and he was like a breath of fresh air. People called him “the smiling pope,” and it seemed like the Church finally had a new start after a very troubled period.
But then—just 33 days into his reign—he unexpectedly died, and so the cardinals met again and the next pope chose the name John Paul II. This was, again, a sign of continuity in an unexpected time of crisis. John Paul II explicitly said that he was now picking up the work that had been begun by John Paul I, so he was signaling people, “All is not lost. That new beginning for the Church that seemed to start under John Paul I can still happen.”
We now move to 2005, after the passing of John Paul II, and we return to the normal pattern of popes picking a previous papal name, but not the name of their predecessor.
This is what you’d expect, since most popes don’t want constant comparisons to their immediate predecessor. Some people won’t have liked their predecessor, and if you pick their name, that will start you off on a bad foot with them.
Furthermore, some people will like your predecessor, and they may compare you unfavorably to him. “I liked the previous pope better. This new guy has the same name, but he just doesn’t live up to what his predecessor did.”
Popes want to be their own man and not constantly be compared to the pope who came immediately before them, so they tend to pick a name from a few popes back. That’s why naming yourself after your predecessor the way John Paul II did is so rare.
Thus it was that in 2005, Joseph Ratzinger picked the name Benedict XVI. There hadn’t been a Pope Benedict since 1922—83 years earlier—when Benedict XV passed on to his reward, so the new pope was reaching back a bit into history.
He explained his name by saying that Benedict XV had been a voice for peace during World War I, and now he wanted to be a voice for peace in his own day.
He also explained the name by saying it referred to a great Christian saint—St. Benedict of Nursia—the famous 6th century monk who had a huge impact on monastic life and who had been declared one of the patron saints of Europe.
It was at the end of Pope Benedict’s reign that I wrote Pope Names, and in doing that study, I noticed that there are periodic patterns where the pool of papal names that are in use changes. It’s like the men being elected pope think that the recent names have gotten kind of stale, and so they start reaching back further, even hundreds of reigns, to find a pope they want to name themselves after.
You can see this if you graph how many popes back they’re reaching for a name. Most of the time, they only reach back a few reigns, but there are occasional big spikes where they reach way far back.
And we’re currently living in such a time. In the 1800s and 1900s, we had 5 Pope Piuses, and more recent popes wanted something new.
- John XXIII reached back hundreds of years to John XXII
- Then Paul VI reached back hundreds of years to Paul V
- And John Paul I picked a completely unprecedented name that had never been used before
I thus recognized that the next pope after Benedict might do something unprecedented. He might pick another name that had never been used before, or he might keep his baptismal name, and I wrote about these possibilities.
I didn’t think that they were the most likely outcomes. In fact, I predicted a specific name based on historic naming patterns as the most likely, which I’ll tell you about in a bit.
But I wrote that the new pope might give us an unprecedented name, and—in my heart—I thought that if he did pick a totally new name, that name might be Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi. Unfortunately, I didn’t publish that specific, unprecedented name.
But it would have been great if I had, because after Pope Benedict resigned, Jorge Bergoglio then picked the name Francis.
I remember when I first heard this name. I was watching the coverage of the conclave with the rest of the Catholic Answers staff in San Diego, and I was following along in Latin as they came out and announced who had been elected. As soon as I heard “Franciscus,” I said “Wow!”
All of a sudden the non-Latin speakers on staff were saying, “What? What?”
And I said, “Pope Francis the First.”
But it wasn’t going to be the first. It was going to be just Pope Francis. He wasn’t going to do what John Paul I did, and based on the convention he was following, he would only become known as Francis I in hindsight if someone later also chose the name Francis.
He explained his name as being after St. Francis of Assisi—as I suspected might happen.
And so there was a parallel between Pope Benedict, who had chosen his name partly in honor of St. Benedict, and Pope Francis who had chosen his name in honor of St. Francis.
St. Francis had a reputation for kindness and gentleness and concern about nature, and so these were the qualities he wanted to aspire to in his reign.
How well he achieved those aspirations, I will leave to you to decide.
Now, I mentioned that in Pope Names—back in 2013—I had a specific name at the top of my list as the likely name of the next pope, based on historic naming trends. So what was that name?
Actually, there were two: Leo XIV and John XXIV. I assigned both of these a 12% probability.
Leo XIV would be more likely if the conclave elected a traditional or centrist pope, and John XXIV would be more likely if they elected a progressive pope.
A few years have gone by, but the situation hasn’t changed that much in the 12 years since I wrote Pope Names, and so it isn’t too surprising that in 2025 Cardinal Robert Prevost chose Leo XIV as his name.
Reportedly, one of the concerns of the cardinals was looking for someone who could help bring the Church and the cardinals back together after the divisive reign of Pope Francis, and Leo would be the name I would have predicted as most likely for a centrist who would try to do this.
In terms of his own explanation of his name, Pope Leo XIV said that he chose it mainly to reflect Pope Leo XIII, who had articulated the Church’s social teaching during the industrial revolution and now we are in another industrial revolution with artificial intelligence.
So, to summarize the names that the 4 most recent popes chose:
- John Paul II emphasized continuity with John Paul I
- Benedict XVI honored Benedict XV and St. Benedict
- Pope Francis honored St. Francis
- And Leo XIV honored Leo XIII
Coming out onto the Loggia
After a new pope decides what name he will use in his papacy—the first decision he makes about how he will present himself to the world—he goes out on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica to greet the people gathered in the square below.
This is his first public appearance, and during it he typically waves to the people, says a few words, and gives the Urbi et Orbi blessing before going back into St. Peter’s.
Once he finally appears, this process doesn’t take very long.
In the videos I found, from the moment the pope comes out to the end of the blessing, it’s only a few minutes.
- John Paul II: ~9 minutes
- Benedict XVI: ~7 minutes
- Francis: ~9 minutes
- Leo XIV: ~14 minutes
Leo was the outlier in this case, taking a bit longer than his predecessors. This may have been because whoever rigged the sound this time around did a really bad job, and there’s a horrible echo when Leo speaks, which may have slowed him down.
Now, I’m not going to go through every word that the new popes said, though there are certainly insights about their reigns to be found in doing that.
Instead, I want to look at how the popes deported themselves before they spoke, because body language is a kind of language, and it tells you something about the person.
Now, this period where the pope is silent goes on for a bit.
And the pope is not really directing how long it lasts. It’s governed by protocol, and there’s other stuff going on. They have a band playing, and that has to finish. People start shouting, “Viva il Papa” or “Long live the pope.”
And then the pope has to wait for someone to bring him a microphone and get it set up for him to speak.
In the cases of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, the period was basically 2 minutes long. In Leo XIV’s case, it was 3 minutes long.
But this is useful for our purposes. Given that it goes on for a few minutes—how is the pope going to fill that time that he can’t speak to the people since he doesn’t yet have a microphone so that they can hear him?
He has to fall back on body language to communicate with the crowd, and so what he does with his body has extra importance.
So let’s go through the footage of the 4 most recent popes and how they handled this moment. If you’re listening to the audio version of the podcast, you can find the footage by going to my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/JimmyAkin.
For now, just watch and take note of what the pope is doing, and I’ll give you my observations after each clip.
First, here’s the footage of John Paul II communicating with the crowd silently through body language.
Note in particular what he does with his eyes, his arms, and his hands.
So the first thing to note is that John Paul is smiling, regularly throughout the video.
He’s using both of his arms.
He repeatedly raises and lowers his arms with the palms up—toward heaven—and looks toward heaven—as if giving credit to God. Or perhaps to just say, “Can you believe it?”
He occasionally clasps his hands, but then he returns to gesturing with his arms.
He presses his palms together in what could be understood as a contemplative or prayerful attitude.
He spreads his arms with his palms turned toward the crowd, as if blessing or embracing them.
He also conveys what I think is a little extra dignity in his mannerisms. They aren’t quite as natural or informal as what we’ll see from some of the other popes.
And John Paul II was quite animated and looked happy.
Now let’s see what happened when Benedict XVI appeared on the loggia.
Benedict XVI comes out, and as soon as he sees the crowd, he smiles, raises his hands to wave in greeting, clasps his hands together, and then spreads his raised arms and starts turning to face different parts of the crowd so that everyone gets to see his face straight-on.
Pope Benedict also gave us big, open-lipped smiles, so you could see his teeth.
He puts his hands together and still brings his arms up and down.
He occasionally has his hands clasped in front of his waist but—still smiling—he regularly raises them again, moves his arms up and down, and turns to face different parts of the crowd.
He briefly lets the smile fade, but then when someone points out that there is someone out of the frame of the camera—I believe these were other cardinals that had now exited the conclave—he turns to them and waves at them specifically.
Especially toward the end, as they’re getting the microphone ready, he raises his arms, clasps and unclasps his hands, and really lets loose with a big smile.
Benedict XVI was very animated. I’d say he was even more animated than John Paul II, which is notable given that Benedict was a full 20 years older than John Paul II had been at the time of his election.
So—if anything—you’d expect him to be slowed down by age and more reserved, but he was even more animated.
Now we come to the first appearance of Francis.
So the first thing you note with Pope Francis is that he’s not wearing the traditional red vestment—known as a mozzetta—that popes wear when they first come out.
Neither is he wearing the stole that wear over that.
Instead, he’s just wearing papal whites.
Put charitably, this was a sign that he wanted to dispense with some of the ceremonial aspects of papal ceremonies like this.
On the other hand, going with tradition and not striking out in new directions immediately is reassuring to the faithful. Wearing something different would be confusing to some people.
So Pope Francis visually indicated that he had a maverick streak from the beginning and was willing to confuse the faithful by not wearing the traditional vestments.
At the beginning of the video, he is smiling, but it’s a pretty modest smile. It’s closed mouth, so we’re not seeing any teeth. And it’s not even a big grin with his mouth closed. He’s not “smiling from ear to ear,” as they say.
Also toward the beginning, he raises his right arm and turns from side to side as a kind of one-armed wave.
He does this twice.
Then—for the rest of the 2 minutes before they get the microphone ready—he drops his arms by his sides. He does not clasp them in front of him.
He just stands there—not doing anything—and his smile fades.
As I was watching this back in 2013, I said to myself: This is a bad sign. He’s not acting the way a pope should on this occasion. He’s not smiling and waving with both arms. He’s just standing there in silence.
This man does not have a sense of what the moment calls him to do, and that’s not a good sign for his papacy.
I also mentioned this to someone in private immediately after it happened.
And I think my assessment was correct.
While a variety of circumstances led to Pope Francis getting some really positive press coverage—especially early on—he was what I deduced him to be from his first moments on the loggia: He had a maverick streak, he was willing to confuse the faithful, and he often did not have a sense of what the moment called him to do.
We thus got a papacy that was beset by communication problems that started with him and that caused a great deal of confusion and anguish.
Now, I have a policy of not speaking ill of a pontiff in public during their reign. That’s something I’ve chosen not to do ever since I became Catholic during the reign of John Paul II. I’ll be more frank in public once the man is no longer my spiritual father.
But I would share my opinions privately during a pontificate, and I often said to friends during the Francis pontificate that I thought he was socially clumsy in how he did things. Even if he made the same eventual decisions, he announced them in ways that were very disruptive, and caused a lot of unnecessary confusion and pain.
Any other recent pope—even if they were implementing the exact same decision—would have handled it much better, and so I was hoping that—after the Francis papacy—we would get a return to normality, to a pope that had better communication and management skills that could give the Church a sense of peace.
So now we come to the first appearance of Pope Leo XIV. What’s it going to be? Will he come out in just the papal whites—visually signaling continuity with Francis—or will he come out in the traditional vestments—visually signaling continuity with the pre-Francis popes?
Further, will he smile and wave with both arms? Or will he just come out and stand there with his arms at his sides after a couple of perfunctory, one-hand waves?
Let’s find out.
So the first thing that you notice is the Pope Leo is wearing the mozzetta and the stole—signaling a return to the tradition of the pre-Francis popes.
That—of itself—is a sign that he is taking a different tack than Francis and wants to reassure the faithful.
When he sees the crowd, he smiles broadly. Then he raises his right hand and begins waving—vigorously—to the crowd.
He presses the palms of his hands together and bounces on his feet before returning to vigorous one-armed waving, smiling even more broadly.
Then he starts waving with both hands.
He clasps his hands in front of him and starts nodding with his head.
He does some left-hand waving.
After a while, he starts having his hands clasped over his stomach, but he’s still visibly smiling and nodding and bouncing a bit.
We get some more two-hand waving.
He presses the palms of his hands together. Then he smiles and interlocks his fingers
And—even if he’s not always waving with his arms—he’s constantly adjusting his body and looks happy and relaxed.
He presses his palms together and nods or bows toward the crowd.
So whew! I was very relieved when I saw all that. This was a return to good papal form—to someone who knew what the moment demanded of him—and I—like a lot of people—had a huge wave of relief.
Now, there would be more lessons to learn if we kept going and analyzed the initial speeches of these popes, though perhaps not as many as you might think, as my understanding is the texts they are given to read are pre-drafted by somebody else, and then they add their own personal touches to them.
Summary
But we’ve already learned a lot just by observing the choices that these popes made even before they began speaking to the world.
- John Paul II chose his name to signal continuity with his predecessor in a time of emergency
- He smiled throughout
- He gestured with both arms
- He looked happy
- And—in a way—I think he conveyed a little extra dignity in his body language
- Benedict XVI chose his name to honor Benedict XV as a man of peace and also the monastic reformer St. Benedict.
- He smiled and waved vigorously to the crowd
- In fact, he was the most physically animated of the 4 popes, despite his age
- And he looked joyful, perhaps the happiest of the 4 popes
- Francis showed a maverick streak by choosing a brand-new papal name that honored St. Francis
- He also showed his maverick streak by dispensing with some of the traditional papal vestments, even though that would confuse some of the faithful
- And his body language was very reserved, with him giving only two waves with one hand
- And then standing there with his arms at his sides
- He was by far the least physically animated of these popes
- He also looked the least happy of the 4 popes
- And Pope Leo XIV returned to standard papal form by picking his name to honor Leo XIII as a pope who helped the Church deal with the modernity of the industrial revolution, with us facing another industrial revolution
- He also chose to wear the standard papal vestments for this occasion—again signaling continuity with pre-Francis popes
- He smiled and at times waved vigorously
- He looked genuinely happy
- He didn’t strike me as quite as animated as Pope Benedict
- I would say that Pope Leo was the second most physically animated after Pope Benedict
- And of the 4 popes, I think he looked the most relaxed and natural
- Even though he wasn’t given the microphone for a full 3 minutes, whereas the other popes only had to go 2 minutes before speaking
I thus was very relieved. After the turbulent and socially clumsy reign of Pope Francis, it was great to have a pope who understood what the moment required of him and who sent conspicuous signals that he was moving in a different direction and that would be reassuring to the faithful, which heralds a time of peace in the Church.
That doesn’t mean it will all be smooth sailing ahead. None of the popes we have covered were perfect, and all of them made unpopular decisions that disappointed people—including some of their biggest fans.
But the signs are good that—after navigating some very turbulent papal waters—we may be in for a time of relatively calm sailing.
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!