About this Event
Like his predecessor Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV is an American pope or, perhaps, more accurately, a pope of the Americas. Born in Chicago, Robert Prevost spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in northern Peru as a missionary. From 1998 to 2013 he returned to Chicago, where he rose to lead the Augustinian Order. He then returned to Peru, where he served as Bishop of Chiclayo until 2023. His election to the papacy in 2025 was unexpected but he has quickly emerged as a popular pontiff in the Americas and beyond, widely recognised for his progressive stance on key issues, from climate change to social justice.
This panel brings together experts in the history of Catholicism in the Americas to examine the regional implications of Leo’s papacy. Against a backdrop of expanding religious pluralism and the rising influence of Protestant churches in politics, what can we expect of a pope whose choice of name, and its evocation of rerum novarum, is intended to signal engagement with a new social question? Does his recent encyclical on Artificial Intelligence and the threat it poses to human dignity signal a direct critique to Silicon Valley capitalism? To what extent will his decades in Peru, alongside his ties to key figures of liberation theology like Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, influence his papacy? These are some of the questions that the panel will address.
Speakers:
Luis Orlando Pérez Jiménez (chair), Jesuit priest, human rights lawyer and theologian, is a PhD candidate at UCL Institute of the Americas, researching high-risk activism among families of Mexico's disappeared. He holds master's degrees in international human rights law (Essex, UK), theology (Javeriana, Colombia) and philosophy and social sciences (ITESO, Mexico).
Anna Cant is an assistant professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is an historian of Latin America with expertise in twentieth-century politics, cultural history and rural development. She is currently writing a transnational history of Catholic radio in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.
Niall H.D. Geraghty is Associate Professor in Latin American Cultural Studies and Director of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College London. Niall’s most recent publication is the open access edited volume (University of London Press, 2025) co-edited with Pablo Bradbury.
Daniel McDonald is a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford. He is a historian of modern Latin America and global Catholicism with a focus on religion and politics, social movements, and the Cold War. At Oxford, he is working on a transnational history of the globalization of the Latin American Catholic Church across the Cold War.
Event venue & nearby stays
Room 103, 51 Gordon Sq, 51 Gordon Square, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.