The pontificate of Pope Francis unfolded during the declining phase of a neoliberal global order whose economic, social, and ecological injustices he persistently denounced. His geopolitical posture combined prophetic critique with pastoral proximity, often expressed through the image of the Church as a "field hospital," attentive to the wounds produced by the contemporary global system. Today, however, the problem appears less the injustices of that order than the fragmentation of the international system itself and the erosion of the institutions that once sustained multilateral cooperation. The theopolitical question is therefore displaced: it concerns not only the Church's response to a wounded world, but its capacity to contribute to rearticulating the very conditions of a shared political horizon.
The early interventions of Pope Leo XIV suggest the contours of such a reorientation. In his inaugural homily, Leo XIV emphasized the primacy of love and unity and described the Church as a community willing to be "made restless by history" while acting as a "leaven of harmony for humanity." These motifs indicate a shift from a primarily therapeutic ecclesial posture toward a more generative vision of the Church as a ferment of unity within a fractured world.
Based on the first writings of pope Leo XIV, this paper argues that Leo XIV's vision signals a(n) (Augustinian) theopolitical reconfiguration of both the Church's global vocation and the figure of the pontiff. Rather than standing chiefly at the margins of a wounded order, the Church appears as a leaven capable of nurturing renewed forms of political and social communion and of sustaining the moral and spiritual conditions under which a shared international order might once again become thinkable.