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VATICAN CITY – When Pope Francis took the helm of the global Catholic Church, he launched his pontificate with an immediate flurry of institutional reforms, leadership reshuffles, and new governing structures that upended longstanding norms. In contrast, Pope Leo XIV has adopted a far more deliberate, methodical approach to his early tenure, prioritizing steady foundational work over rapid change as he charts a path for his papacy.

As Leo settles into his role, he has already finalized several notable leadership and policy shifts, while a handful of high-stakes challenges loom on the horizon that will test his authority and vision for the church.

### Upcoming Key Appointments to Reshape Church Leadership
A series of impending leadership vacancies in the United States and the Vatican will give Leo a unique opportunity to mold the church’s global hierarchy and central governance to align with his priorities.

In Chicago, one of the most prominent U.S. archdioceses, Cardinal Blase Cupich turned 77 in March – two years past the standard mandatory retirement age for Catholic bishops, leaving the door open for Leo to appoint a new leader to his home country’s major see. By the end of December, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez will reach the standard retirement age of 75, giving Leo the chance to name a new head of the largest archdiocese in the United States. He has already filled one top U.S. vacancy, appointing Archbishop Ronald Hicks to succeed retiring Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. According to Michael Moreland, a professor of law and religion at Villanova University – Leo’s alma mater – that appointment did not carry a strong ideological lean in either direction, reflecting the pope’s overall cautious, non-partisan approach to personnel decisions.

At the Vatican level, several senior leadership roles will soon open up. British Cardinal Arthur Roche, 76, leads the Vatican’s liturgy office, which oversaw Pope Francis’ highly controversial restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass. The selection of Roche’s eventual successor will be closely watched for clues about how Leo plans to address this deeply divisive issue within the church. American Cardinal Kevin Farrell, 78, who is well past retirement age, still heads the Vatican’s department for family and laity, and holds two other high-stakes posts: camerlengo, the official who oversaw the conclave that elected Leo, and chair of the Holy See’s most sensitive committees overseeing financial investments and the Vatican City State’s highest court of appeal. Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Vatican’s office for migrants, environment and development, will turn 80 in July. Once he turns 80, he will be ineligible to vote in future papal conclaves, dropping the total number of voting-age cardinals to 117 – below the traditional 120-person cap. That shift paves the way for Leo to announce his first slate of new cardinals within the next year, expanding the college of electors who will one day choose his successor.

### Policy Shifts: Rolling Back and Revising Francis-Era Initiatives
From the start of his pontificate, Francis encouraged young Catholics to disrupt diocesan institutions and “make a mess” to drive renewal. Leo has moved quickly to unwind and reorganize a number of these initiatives, addressing what he and other leaders see as unworkable structures born of Francis’ agenda.

In April, the Vatican canceled the World Day of Children, a signature Francis initiative that had drawn ongoing questions about its core mission and purpose. The cancellation followed Leo’s formal disbanding of the ad hoc pontifical commission Francis created to organize the event in 2024. In December, Leo dissolved a Holy See fundraising commission that had been established under questionable circumstances in 2025, during the final weeks of Francis’ life when he was hospitalized. The commission was composed entirely of Italian members with no professional fundraising experience, and its president was a senior official from the Secretariat of State – the same Vatican department Francis stripped of asset management authority after it lost tens of millions of euros in the infamous London property investment scandal. After disbanding the flawed commission, Leo launched a new, reorganized committee to develop transparent, effective fundraising strategies and structures.

Ward Fitzgerald, president of The Papal Foundation, a U.S.-based group of wealthy donors that funds papal charity projects across the developing world, noted: “The Holy Father was clearly paying attention. He realized that it was not going to be highly functional.”

Beyond organizational overhauls, Leo has also revised Francis-era financial policy: he revoked a 2022 law that concentrated all Holy See financial power in the Vatican bank, issuing a new regulation that allows the Holy See’s investment committee to work with external banks when it delivers better financial outcomes. Leo has also broken new ground on the long-running clergy sexual abuse crisis, meeting with activist survivor groups who advocate for institutional reform. Survivors say the pope promised ongoing dialogue as they push the Vatican to adopt a binding global zero-tolerance policy for abuse. While Francis met regularly with individual abuse survivors, he largely kept organized activist advocacy groups at arm’s length.

### Private Audiences Reveal Openness to Diverse Perspectives
Pope Leo’s closed-door private meetings with a range of stakeholders have offered insight into his priorities, showing he is willing to engage with groups across ideological divides even as he keeps his own final positions closely held. In mid-March, he met with Gareth Gore, author of a controversial book alleging widespread abuses within the influential conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei. In February, he held a private audience with a delegation from Courage International, a church-affiliated organization that supports people with same-sex attraction seeking to live in accordance with Catholic teaching on chastity. While critics have labeled the group anti-gay and accused it of promoting conversion therapy, the organization denies those claims. Earlier in March, he met with the authors of a new book on traditional Latin Mass Catholics in the U.S., who presented findings from their large-scale survey of the community. Leo has made clear he is well aware of the deep divisions sparked by Francis’ Latin Mass restrictions, and has expressed a desire to hear directly from traditionalist Catholics to better understand their perspectives as he works to heal rifts over the traditional liturgy.

### Two Major Looming Challenges
The ongoing dispute over the traditional Latin Mass is on track to reach a critical turning point on July 1, when four new traditionalist bishops are set to be consecrated without Pope Leo’s formal approval. The bishops belong to the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a breakaway traditionalist group, and an unsanctioned consecration would qualify as a schismatic act that automatically triggers excommunication for all involved. While the SSPX remains a fringe group within the broader traditionalist Catholic movement, traditionalists in full communion with the Holy See are closely watching how Leo responds to the provocation. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, the Vatican faces the threat of a major institutional split with the German Catholic Church over its years-long Synodal Path reform process. German leaders have proposed creating a permanent joint governing body made up of both bishops and lay Catholics to make collective decisions – a direct break from traditional Catholic ecclesiology, which reserves full governing authority for bishops. The Vatican has already publicly stated its opposition to this shared governance structure, and has also pushed back against German proposals to formalize public blessings for same-sex couples, a practice Francis only allowed on an informal, spontaneous basis. A direct confrontation is likely once the full German reform proposals are submitted to Rome for final approval.

### The Upcoming Landmark Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence
While many outside observers frame the most pressing issue for Leo as his relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump and the prospect of a papal visit to the U.S. (currently, no visit is scheduled for 2025), the pope himself has signaled his top near-term priority is his first encyclical. The document, which is expected to be released in the coming weeks, focuses on artificial intelligence and broader questions of global peace and justice. Leo has already drawn a parallel between the AI revolution and the industrial upheaval of the late 19th century, which his namesake Pope Leo XIII addressed in his landmark 1891 encyclical *Rerum Novarum* on workers’ rights. “Like his namesake Leo XIII with the Industrial Revolution, Leo clearly sees the church as having something important to offer in an era of what may turn out to be epochal technological change,” said Dan Rober, associate professor of Catholic studies at Sacred Heart University.

This reporting on religion was supported by a collaboration between the Associated Press and The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The Associated Press holds sole editorial responsibility for this content.

Eighty years after the end of World War II, one of the conflict’s most decorated joint heroes of Wales and France remains at the center of an unresolved, little-known mystery: how exactly did Jacques Vaillant de Guélis meet his death just days after the guns fell silent in Europe?

Born in 1907 in central Cardiff to French parents who built their fortune exporting Welsh coal to Brittany, Vaillant de Guélis was a polyglot Oxford graduate with a thriving career in advertising when war broke out across Europe in 1939. Like many of his generation, he walked away from his comfortable civilian life to enlist in the British Army, and his unique background – a French-born upbringing paired with deep roots in the UK – quickly caught the eye of Britain’s most elite covert organization: the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the shadowy unit tasked with sabotage and resistance building behind enemy lines.

Vaillant de Guélis’s military career was defined by near-miraculous escapes and relentless courage from its earliest days. In 1939, he served as a liaison officer with the British Expeditionary Force, and after Germany’s invasion of France forced the Dunkirk evacuation, he immediately volunteered to return to occupied France in June 1940 to help evacuate thousands of stranded Allied soldiers. When he completed that mission, it was too late to escape across the English Channel, so he led a small group south through Marseille, crossed the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, where he was interned for months before British diplomatic efforts secured his release and a return to Scotland.

That bold exploit put him on the SOE’s radar in April 1941. Recruited by Major Lewis Gielgud (brother of legendary actor Sir John Gielgud) and even reportedly interviewed for the role personally by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Vaillant de Guélis began his career as a covert operative. He completed four separate missions behind German lines over the course of the war. His first deployment, in August 1941, saw him parachute into Vichy France, where he supplied resistance fighters with forged documents, radio equipment, and critical military intelligence to coordinate attacks against Nazi forces. After successfully completing that mission, he extracted via a rough, makeshift airstrip picked up by the Royal Air Force.

By 1943, Vaillant de Guélis had joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army in North Africa, fighting through the North African campaign before joining the assault to liberate Corsica, where he saw brutal hand-to-hand combat to oust German forces from the island. After D-Day in 1944, he was once again dropped behind enemy lines, tasked with coordinating resistance cells to disrupt German retreats from the Allied advance. Author and World War II historian Greg Lewis, who has researched Vaillant de Guélis extensively, notes that deploying an operative of his seniority and knowledge of SOE networks directly into the field was extremely risky – but Vaillant de Guélis’s proven skill and local familiarity made him irreplaceable.

It was his final mission, however, that would end his life just days after the war in Europe officially ended. On May 16, 1945, just eight days after VE Day, Vaillant de Guélis was sent to the newly liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp near the modern-day Czech-German border to gather intelligence on captured SOE operatives who had been imprisoned and killed there. While he was standing just yards from the camp gates, he was struck by a car driven by a German soldier who had worked as a camp guard just days earlier. He was rushed to emergency care in Paris, then transferred to a military hospital in Staffordshire, England, where he died from his injuries three months later on August 7, 1945.

To this day, the circumstances of the crash remain unclear, fueling decades of speculation. Many have suggested that Vaillant de Guélis may have been deliberately targeted by a former Nazi camp guard who wanted to prevent evidence of war crimes from reaching Allied authorities – evidence that would later be used to prosecute Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials. Lewis, who first became interested in Vaillant de Guélis while researching Cathays Cemetery in Cardiff, where the hero’s ashes are buried in a family plot, says there is no concrete evidence to support claims of an organized assassination. But the speed with which the case was closed – it was shut down almost immediately after it was opened – and the lack of surviving documentation has left critical questions unanswered. Lewis acknowledges that while chaos across post-war Germany makes an organized plot unlikely, a rogue former Nazi acting alone to silence Vaillant de Guélis cannot be ruled out.

Vaillant de Guélis was posthumously honored for his extraordinary bravery by both his home nations: he received the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from the United Kingdom and the Croix de Guerre with Palm, France’s highest award for gallantry, from the French government. Today, a blue plaque marks the Cardiff building where he was born, honoring his service. For Lewis, the tragedy of Vaillant de Guélis’s story extends beyond his early death: unlike many SOE operatives who survived the war and left firsthand recollections of their service, all that remains of his legacy is an official military file, with no personal memoir or firsthand account of his extraordinary exploits.

In the ornate Baroque Catholic monastery church of Banz, nestled near the Bavarian town of Bad Staffelstein in southern Germany, a striking, centuries-old exhibit continues to draw curiosity and quiet unease from visitors: four fully intact skeletons, draped in luxurious silk and brocade, embellished with gemstones, delicate filigree gold, silver and fine lace. These remains, known by the names Vincenzius, Valerius, Benedictus and Felix Benedictus, count among Europe’s little-known collection of catacomb saints, a set of religious relics with a unique history stretching back hundreds of years.

These holy skeletons were transported from Roman catacombs to the Benedictine monastery between the late 17th century and mid-18th century, a period when demand for early Christian martyr relics boomed across Catholic Europe. For many first-time visitors, the display is unsettling. “It’s actually a little creepy,” church custodian Anita Gottschlich shared quietly, standing before one skeleton whose hollow eye sockets seem to lock gaze with onlookers. Even so, Gottschlich notes the relics hold enduring cross-generational fascination: older guests who first saw the skeletons as children still make a point to seek out what locals call the Holy Bodies, their memories of the display undimmed after decades.

While catacomb saints may be unknown to many modern travelers, their decorated remains can still be found in dozens of Baroque churches and monasteries across Bavaria, as well as in neighboring Austria, Switzerland, Czechia and their native Italy. Most are permanently displayed in glass, coffin-style cabinets, keeping the long-dead relics accessible to visitors centuries after they arrived.

The story of catacomb saints begins in 16th century Rome, when excavators uncovered thousands of unmarked graves in the city’s ancient underground catacombs. Church leadership quickly classified all uncovered remains as early Christian martyrs, making them desirable relics for churches and monastic communities across the continent. “At the time, the church simply designated them all as saints,” explained Walter Ries, the Catholic priest who serves the Banz church congregation today. “And of course, in many countries, including Germany, people wanted to have such holy remains, such relics, simply because this enhanced the status of their own church or monastery and perhaps turned it into a place of pilgrimage.”

Banz Monastery itself has changed dramatically since the four skeletons arrived. Founded by Benedictine monks in 1070, the community flourished for more than 700 years before it was dissolved in 1803 during widespread German secularization. Today, only the church remains an active place of worship, housing a small congregation of just 211 people, while the former monastery buildings are occupied by a political foundation. “A great deal has changed over the course of the centuries,” Ries said. “Back then, these relics were very important, but today they really aren’t anymore.”

The surge in devotion to catacomb saints in the 17th and 18th centuries emerged from a period of profound crisis in central Europe. Just decades before the Banz skeletons arrived, the region was still recovering from the Thirty Years’ War, a brutal conflict that began as a religious struggle between Catholics and Protestants and killed an estimated 4 to 8 million people through combat, famine and widespread disease. “That was a terrible time,” Ries said. “And so people tried to open the gates of heaven through the Baroque. That’s why everything was designed so beautifully. It was an escape from the present, which was often so terrible. That’s also why these eerie skeletons were so beautifully draped and depicted as lifelike as possible.”

Abbots of Banz Monastery sent official delegations to Rome twice, first in 1680 and again in 1645, to secure the four relics. After their arrival, nuns from the nearby town of Bamberg spent hours carefully adorning the skeletons in the lavish textiles and finery they still wear today.

To this day, the Holy Bodies are only put on full public display for special religious occasions including All Saints’ Day. For most of the year, wooden panels painted with portraits of the saints cover the glass display cases, turning a rare viewing into a meaningful experience for faithful visitors. According to Günter Dippold, a historian who has spent years researching both catacomb saints and the history of Banz Monastery, the elaborate decoration of the skeletons serves a specific theological purpose that many modern visitors miss.

The adornment “is not meant to show the dead body of a saint, but rather to show his glorified body,” Dippold explained. “It is therefore intended to show the faithful who view it what we will look like after the resurrection, after being raised from the dead, when we no longer have our earthly bodies but rather glorified ones.”

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This report is part of Associated Press religion coverage, supported through a collaboration with The Conversation US via funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP holds sole responsibility for all content.