VANCOUVER — As white smoke rose above the Sistine Chapel on Thursday morning, Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, was at Sacred Heart Church in Ladner, celebrating Mass ahead of the March for Life in Victoria.
Father Francis Galvan, OSA, the pastor, leaned over after the first reading and quietly said: “There’s been white smoke.”
“That gives about a 40-minute window before the new Pope is announced,” Archbishop Miller recalled. “And so I was on the way back to Vancouver — actually just at the Massey Tunnel — when I was following it on the media. Cardinal Prevost had been elected as Leo XIV.”
“It was certainly a surprise, frankly, to me,” he said. “Although he had been sort of in a wider group of so-called ‘papabile’, he wasn’t in the top five or six that the media had identified — and that I, too, had more or less identified as the top runners. But we were all surprised. The Holy Spirit had a different plan in mind.”
He reflected on the fact that someone from Chicago, in the United States of America, is now the successor of Peter. “It’s the first time anyone from North America has succeeded to the Petrine office. It’s amazing. It’s really a wonderful testimony that the electors went beyond political considerations — like American superpower status — simply to find the best man available, who in a sense happened to be an American.”
He has “enormous experience in Latin America, where he served as a bishop in Peru — not in his home country,” said Archbishop Miller. “He’s spent time in Rome, studied with the Dominicans, was rector of a seminary in Peru, taught canon law, and most recently he’s been a cardinal for a little less than two years. But in his position as head of the Dicastery for Bishops, he obviously enjoyed the trust of Pope Francis and of his fellow cardinals.”
The election was “rather quick,” he said. “This is only the second day — maybe the fourth or fifth ballot — which shows great unanimity. There was no major kind of blocking or power plays that endlessly delay the election.”
Archbishop Miller found the Pope’s chosen name particularly striking. “When I heard it — Leo XIV — I said, ‘Wow, what an interesting and bold choice of name.’ That’s really a throwback to a nineteenth-century Pope.
Leo XIII, from 1878 to 1903, “was sort of the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He revived interest in St. Thomas Aquinas at the end of the 19th century. He was a great devotee of Thomism. That fits very much with the profile of the new Pope,” he said.
The Archbishop added: “The new Pope has a very interesting intellectual background. He’s trained in canon law, with his license and doctorate from the Angelicum — the Dominican university in Rome — and he taught canon law as well. He’s an Augustinian. That background was common to Benedict XVI, who was a great scholar of Augustinian thought. So Pope Leo studied with the Dominicans and has that rich Augustinian foundation too.”
Asked what the election might mean for Canada and First Nations, Archbishop Miller was cautiously optimistic: “I know he was certainly in a diocese in Peru with a large Indigenous population. So I’m sure he’s very familiar with the particular needs and challenges facing Indigenous cultures. I doubt if he knows specifically that much about Canada — I could be wrong — but his experience would speak very positively in that regard.”
As for how the new Pope might be received in Canada, Archbishop Miller said: “I’m sure he’ll be welcome. He knows the North American situation. Different groups had different hopes, with certain candidates in mind — Filipino Catholics, for example, were looking for Cardinal Tagle — but he’s the one chosen. We all pull together behind him. We had our favourites, but we go with the one chosen, and happily.”
As of Thursday’s noon Mass at Holy Rosary Cathedral, the Pope’s name was back in the Mass, he noted.
The Archbishop said the 5:10 p.m. Mass at the cathedral would be offered for the new Pope “as a sign of our communion with Leo XIV — because he’s the one we’re all united to. That’s the visible sign of Catholicity.”
He invited all Catholics in the Archdiocese of Vancouver to pray for Pope Leo XIV:
O God, who in your providential design
willed that your Church be built
upon blessed Peter, whom you set over the other Apostles,
look with favour, we pray, on Pope Leo XIV,
and grant that he, whom you have made Peter’s successor,
may be for your people a visible source and foundation
of unity in faith and of communion.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
