U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, who on Thursday was elected as the new leader of the Catholic Church taking up the name of Leo XIV, is a soft-spoken figure who has shunned the limelight during his priestly career.

The 69-year-old from Chicago has served as a missionary in Peru and has given few media interviews. However, he spoke to Vatican News in May 2023, upon his appointment as head of the Vatican department that oversees bishops’ appointments, and to RAI Italian public television before the conclave.

Factbox: What’s in the new pope’s in-tray

BUDGET WOES

The Vatican, despite the late Pope Francis’ cost-cutting efforts and financial management reforms, faces an 83-million-euro ($94.22 million) budget shortfall, two knowledgeable sources have told Reuters, and a much larger funding gap in its pension fund.

The pension shortfall was estimated to total some 631 million euros by the Vatican’s finance czar in 2022. There has been no official update to this figure, but several insiders told Reuters they believe it has ballooned.

FAITH CRISIS IN EUROPE

While the total number of Catholics, as measured by the number of baptised, keeps increasing and has surpassed the 1.4 billion mark, mostly thanks to growth in Africa, Church attendance and priestly vocations are dwindling in Europe.

In Germany, the EU’s most populous nation, the national bishops’ conference reported earlier this year that only 29 new priests had been ordained in the country in 2024, an historic low.

They also said around 321,000 German Catholics had left the Church that year. The total number of Catholics in Germany, whose population of 83 million was once about half Catholic, is now under 20 million.

DIVORCEES, LGBT, WOMEN

Under Francis, tensions between traditionalists and modernisers erupted over whether the Church should be more welcoming towards the LGBT community and divorcees, and let women play a greater role in church affairs.

Francis did not formally change church doctrine, but opened the door to communion for divorcees and blessings for same-sex couples, although he did not allow a relaxation of priestly celibacy rules or the ordination of women deacons.

The debate over whether to consolidate, expand or roll back these reforms is likely to continue in the coming years, if not decades, forcing the new pope into some sort of balancing act between opposing demands.

CHILD ABUSE

The new pope is destined to continue grappling with the scandal of clerical sex abuse and its cover up, which has dogged the global Catholic Church for at least three decades, seriously undermining its standing.

Francis and his predecessor Benedict XVI committed themselves to a policy of zero tolerance, but their reforms have delivered at best partial results, with uneven implementation across different continents.

DIPLOMACY

Argentine Francis, the first pope from the so-called Global South, was not afraid to use his moral pulpit to ruffle Western feathers.

He spearheaded a controversial Vatican deal with China on the appointment of bishops, had fraught relations with Israel over the war in Gaza, and at times appeared to urge Ukraine to give up on its war of defence against Russia.

He was a vocal campaigner for action on climate change and a critic of tough European and U.S. immigration policies, putting himself at odds with U.S. President Donald Trump after he called Trump’s plans to deport millions of migrants a disgrace.

Will the new pope be willing to continue in the same vein?

Here are some extracts from those interviews:

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ON HIS FAMILY BACKGROUND:

“I was born in the United States … But my grandparents were all immigrants, French, Spanish … I was raised in a very Catholic family, both of my parents were very engaged in the parish.” (RAI)

ON CONSIDERING DROPPING PLANS FOR PRIESTHOOD:

He talked with his father about “very concrete things, doubts that a young man may have (such as) ‘perhaps it is better (that) I leave this life and I get married, I have children, a normal life”. (RAI)

ON BEING PROMOTED TO A TOP VATICAN JOB IN 2023:

“I still consider myself a missionary. My vocation, like that of every Christian, is to be a missionary, to proclaim the Gospel wherever one is.” (Vatican News)

ON HOW TO BE A BISHOP:

“We are often preoccupied with teaching doctrine, the way of living our faith, but we risk forgetting that our first task is to teach what it means to know Jesus Christ and to bear witness to our closeness to the Lord.” (Vatican News)

ON CHURCH DIVISIONS:

“Divisions and polemics in the Church do not help anything. We bishops especially must accelerate this movement towards unity, towards communion in the Church.” (Vatican News)

ON THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION:

“Too many times we have allowed the Church to become an institution in part or in its entirety… One thinks of the Vatican, the Holy See, there are institutional dimensions, but that is not the heart of what the Church is and must be.” (RAI)

ON WOMEN BEING APPOINTED AS MEMBERS OF THE VATICAN’S DICASTERY FOR BISHOPS, AN INNOVATION BY POPE FRANCIS:

“On several occasions we have seen that their point of view is an enrichment.” (Vatican News)

ON THE DUTY OF BISHOPS TO ACT AGAINST SEX ABUSE:

“We cannot close our hearts, the door of the Church, to people who have suffered from abuse. The responsibility of the bishop is great, and I think we still have to make great efforts to respond to this situation that is causing so much pain in the Church. It will take time.”

“In any case, silence is not an answer. Silence is not the solution. We must be transparent and honest, we must accompany and assist the victims, because otherwise their wounds will never heal. There is a great responsibility in this, for all of us.” (Vatican News)

ON FINANCIAL CHALLENGES FOR THE CHURCH:

“The (late) Pope (Francis) has told us that he wants a Church that is poor and for the poor (…) Personally, I am not of the opinion that the Church should sell everything and ‘only’ preach the Gospel in the streets. However, this is a very big responsibility, there are no one-size-fits-all answers.” (Vatican News)

ON THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

“Social media can be an important tool to communicate the Gospel message reaching millions of people. We must prepare ourselves to use social media well.”

“(There are) situations where we really have to think several times before speaking or before writing a message on Twitter, in order to answer or even just to ask questions in a public form, in full view of everyone. Sometimes there is a risk of fuelling divisions and controversy.” (Vatican News)