VATICAN CITY  -  Pope Leo XIV said Friday he was elected new head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics so the Church can be a “beacon” to reach areas suffering a “lack of faith”. “God has called me by your election” to be a “faithful administrator” of the Church so that it can be “an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world”, Leo said in his first homily at the Sistine Chapel. “There are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power or pleasure”, he said during a mass for cardinals, according to video broadcast by the Vatican. “These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied.

“Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed,” said the first US pontiff, a former missionary in Peru. Leo’s address to cardinals came less than 24 hours after his election as spiritual head of the 2,000-year-old institution, which counts 1.4 billion faithful around the globe. “A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society,” Leo said.

He also warned against reducing Jesus to “a kind of charismatic leader or superman”, in an apparent message to evangelical Christians. “Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. “This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptised Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism,” he said.

The archbishop of Philadelphia, the US city where the first American pope Leo XIV spent his student days, told AFP after the pontiff was elected that he “honestly didn’t think it would be him”. “Not because of him, but because being an American, that just has not been the case,” said Archbishop Nelson J. Perez. Robert Prevost’s election as the first US head of the Catholic Church has prompted celebration and surprise in both his hometown Chicago and Philadelphia, where he graduated from an Augustinian university.

Perez heard the news while returning from Rome, where he had traveled without attending the conclave that elected Prevost. “I received a text message from one of my staff members. Basically, ‘Cardinal Prevost, Leo XIV’,” Perez said from the vast Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where late pope Francis gave a sermon in 2015. “I was like, ‘Wow, I just can’t believe it’.” The consensus, the 63-year-old archbishop thought, was that the United States’ huge influence on the world stage meant Prevost’s election “would not really happen.”

Perez knew Prevost personally from their time working together in Peru in the early 2000s, when there were moments where the two were “just talking informally.” “Never did I think that this individual was going to become the pope,” Perez said. The new pontiff has both US and Peruvian nationality after spending more than 20 years in the Latin American country. Perez predicted that, like his predecessor, Provost would make helping immigrants and poor people a priority.

Born on September 14, 1955, in Chicago to parents of French, Italian and Spanish descent, Prevost attended a minor seminary of the Order of St Augustine in St Louis as a novice.

He graduated from Philadelphia’s Villanova University with a degree in mathematics. “While he was in college, he had a little side job as a groundskeeper for one of our parish cemeteries,” the Philadelphia archbishop said, grinning. “Amazing story, right? So the pope worked here.”

Known as the cradle of democracy, Philadelphia is home to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.

More recently, it was reinvented as the setting of the “Rocky” films about an Italian Catholic boxer played by Sylvester Stallone.

The historic city can now add being the pope’s university town to its accolades.