Pope Leo XIV and the Church’s New Era

After white smoke emerged over St. Peter’s Basilica last week, a little-known American cardinal, Robert Francis Prevost, stepped onto the balcony as Pope Leo XIV, punctuating a conclave that captivated the world and inaugurated a new era for the Roman Catholic Church.

City Journal contributing editor John Ketcham sketches a profile of the American pope, who ascends the throne of St. Peter after years of missionary and pastoral work. After Pope Francis’s often-fractious relationship with the United States, Ketcham believes Leo’s election signifies the Vatican’s openness to align with America as the leader of the free world. “A priest from the nation’s heartland,” he writes, “now stands as the world’s foremost moral and spiritual voice.”

Read the rest of his piece here.

When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, he called it one of the most significant laws in American history. As Judge Glock shows in his feature for the Spring 2025 issue of City Journal, that assessment is undoubtedly true—but not in the way Biden intended. The IRA’s real legacy is a costly and chaotic expansion of green giveaways, activist slush funds, and subsidies for the wealthy.

Marketed as a climate and deficit-fighting bill, the IRA will likely cost more than $1 trillion while delivering dubious environmental benefits. It’s packed with everything from tax credits for rich EV buyers to $7 billion grants for newly formed “climate justice” banks staffed by former administration officials. “Environmental projects are probably the most overfinanced initiatives in history,” Glock writes. “Having all this new federal money chase after a shrinking pool of viable projects will further reduce the returns on that lending and raise the chance of defaults—which taxpayers will have to cover.”

Biden may be out of the Oval Office, but Americans will be paying the price for his initiatives for years to come.

Americans now gamble nearly $1 billion a day on online platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel. And the vast majority of industry profits come from a sliver of addicted users, many of them young men already deep in debt.

Isaac Rose-Berman makes the case for more aggressive regulation in our age of “engineered addiction” and ubiquitous tracking of personal information. He proposes banning online casinos, restricting gambling ads, requiring operators to flag signs of addiction, and establishing national self-exclusion lists.

“The question facing policymakers isn’t whether gambling should exist, but how to prevent addiction and predation while permitting recreational use,” he writes. “Americans should be free to gamble—but not with loaded dice.”

New York City’s tenant-protection laws are some of the nation’s strongest. Unfortunately, some renters take advantage of these policies by refusing to pay rent, which drags landlords into legal disputes and further adds to housing courts’ backlog of cases.

The dysfunction isn’t fair to landlords, of course, but it’s not fair to honest tenants, either, who are left to pay the price via higher rents.

Adam Lehodey spoke to landlords to understand how this dynamic is playing out. He argues that the city must hire more judges and staff and strengthen protections against bad-faith litigation.

Charles Fain Lehman, Judge Glock, Rafael Mangual, and John Sailer discuss the House tax bill, California governor Gavin Newsom’s model ordinance on homelessness, and summer vacation plans.

In a recent performance review, the City University of New York’s Board of Trustees said that Felix Matos Rodriguez would keep his job as chancellor, despite rumors that he would step down.

He has faced criticism over his handling of anti-Israel protests at CUNY’s campuses, most recently at Brooklyn College, where 14 people were taken into custody for disrupting final exams and setting up an encampment.

Nine city and state lawmakers had called for Rodriguez to, you know, do something about the anti-Semitic protests, writing in a letter that it was “unacceptable”—and “not surprising”—that nearly two years after October 7, “we are still grappling with disruptive and criminal behavior against Jewish students, encampments and masked agitators on campus.” Councilmember Inna Vernikov even called for Rodriguez to resign if he didn’t plan to take action.

Unsurprisingly, Rodriguez defended his actions against the protests, noting that the school’s president called in the NYPD, and stated that he was committed to fighting anti-Semitism. Here’s hoping he means it—and does more to protect Jewish students from violent protests and intimidating behavior on campus.

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Photo credits: Vatican Pool / Contributor / Getty Images News via Getty Images