When Pope Leo XIV surprised tens of thousands of young people at a recent Holy Year celebration with an impromptu popemobile romp around St. Peter’s Square, it almost seemed as if some of the informal spontaneity that characterized Pope Francis’ 12-year papacy had returned to the Vatican.

But the message Leo delivered that night was all his own: In seamless English, Spanish and Italian, Leo told the young people that they were the “salt of the Earth, the light of the world.”

He urged them to spread their hope, faith in Christ and their cries of peace wherever they go.

As Robert Prevost marks his 100th day as Pope Leo this weekend, the contours of his pontificate have begun to come into relief, primarily where he shows continuity with Francis and where he signals change.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that after 12 sometimes turbulent years under Francis, a certain calm and reserve have returned to the papacy.

Leo seems eager above all to avoid polemics or making the papacy about himself, and wants instead to focus on Christ and peace.

That seems exactly what many Catholic faithful want, and may respond to what today's church needs.

Leo has certainly gone out of his way in his first 100 days to try to heal divisions that deepened during Francis’ pontificate, offering messages of unity and avoiding controversy at almost every turn.

Even his signature issue — confronting the promise and peril posed by artificial intelligence — is something that conservatives and progressives alike agree is important.

Francis' emphasis on caring for the environment and migrants often alienated conservatives.

Closer to home, Leo offered the Holy See bureaucracy a reassuring, conciliatory message after Francis’ occasionally authoritarian style rubbed some in the Vatican the wrong way.

“Popes come and go, but the Curia remains,” Leo told Vatican officials soon after his May 8 election.

Leo, though, has cemented Francis’ environmental legacy by celebrating the first-ever ecologically inspired Mass.

He has furthered that legacy by giving the go-ahead for the Vatican to turn a 430-hectare (1,000-acre) field north of Rome into a vast solar farm that should generate enough electricity to meet Vatican City’s needs and turn it into the world’s first carbon-neutral state.

He has fine-tuned financial transparency regulations that Francis initiated, tweaked some other decrees to give them consistency and logic, and confirmed Francis in deciding to declare one of the 19th century’s most influential saints, John Henry Newman, a “doctor” of the church.

But he hasn’t granted any sit-down, tell-all interviews or made headline-grabbing, off-the-cuff comments like his predecessor did.

He hasn’t made any major appointments, including to fill his old job, or taken any big trips.

In marking the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki last week, he had a chance to match Francis’ novel declaration that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was “immoral.” But he didn’t.

Compared to President Donald Trump, the other American world leader who took office in 2025 with a flurry of Sharpie-penned executive decrees, Leo has eased into his new job slowly, deliberately and quietly, almost trying not to draw attention to himself.

At 69, he seems to know that he has time on his side, and that after Francis’ revolutionary papacy, the church might need a bit of a breather.

AP Video shot by Silvia Stellacci