The Dallas Morning News on how Pope Leo XIV is a symbol of hope in a world of suffering:

Our world needs symbols of hope, compassion and something greater than the struggles of this life.

For that reason, we believe so many people, not just Roman Catholics, pay great attention to the selection of a new pope, in the belief that faith, even a faith they may not share, matters.

The election of an American, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, as the next pope was a great surprise, even if its significance remains to be fully understood. All we can really say is that it is significant for reasons both moral and political, and the response of people all over the world echoes that truth.

Pope Leo XIV, who left his Chicago home as a teenager for a life of missionary work in Peru, is a man of the world who represents so many places of importance to the Roman Catholic faithful, from the U.S. to Latin America to the Vatican.

We join millions of others in wishing him the best in his work leading the world’s Catholics.

The fact that so many of us, believers and non-believers, Christians and non-Christians, are interested in who becomes pope says something about the role of faith in human life.

That interest ascends from a natural human longing for something beyond this world, beyond its material comforts, its suffering and pain, its assurance of death. In Christianity, the meaning of our temporal life is defined in the belief that eternal life with the divine awaits for those who faithfully live in the light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Other faiths define the path to salvation or to peace in different ways. But a common thread among cultures and times is the search for that path.

Because all faith represents a moral frame that orders life around particular rules, it is inevitable that the papacy and politics are entwined. For that reason, the question of whether Pope Leo will be conservative, moderate or progressive will dominate much of the secular discussion of his papacy.

But the intense interest in his selection belies the notion that routine politics is what people care about here. Those questions are, so often, temporal and corporeal. The real work of faith is so far outside those narrow concerns that politics diminishes in face of questions like “How was I created?” and “Why do I exist?”

The answer we so often hear now from the secular elite is that there is no answer or that any answer is as good as any other. Meaning itself is relative. Truth is fungible.

Pope Leo’s answer, we must believe, would be that we each exist as the precious creation of a loving God, born into a world of suffering and sin that is not our true home, and that we are each vested with the dignity of our common humanity.

Even those who don’t align with Catholicism or Christianity may see in the selection of a new pope a symbol of meaning beyond this world, of a greater good that humanity can achieve.

Is it any wonder then that people turn their faces towards such hope and such belief?