Pope Leo XIV’s moral voice has resounded in global politics during the first year of his papacy, on war, immigration and artificial intelligence.

But in quieter, more personal ways, the first pope from the United States has also been shaping the future of the Roman Catholic Church in his home country — one bishop at a time.

So far, Leo has made roughly 30 announcements involving new bishops, elevated bishops or retiring bishops in the United States, offering an early look at what the American church hierarchy will become under his leadership.

He appears to be naming bishops not primarily as political statements, but rather as leaders who, like him, have focused on pastoral care and local management, and who reflect the changing composition of Catholic pews and priests.

Last week, Leo appointed Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala to be the next bishop of Wheeling-Charleston, the diocese that covers West Virginia. The first Salvadoran bishop in the United States, Bishop Menjivar-Ayala became a citizen 20 years ago after a period as an undocumented immigrant, an experience that resonates with many Catholic families in the country.

In his own story, Bishop Menjivar-Ayala sees the story of Leo, who as a young priest moved to Peru from the United States to be a missionary and then became both a bishop and a citizen of his new country. Leo’s appointments have a global perspective, he said.

“Those decisions are not taken from political points of view, but what are the needs of that community?” he said. “Jesus said if you want to be great, you should become the servant of all.”

The same day Bishop Menjivar-Ayala was appointed, Leo also named Father John Gomez, a Colombian-born priest who became a U.S. citizen five years ago, to lead the Diocese of Laredo on Texas’ border with Mexico.

Father Gomez, currently the vicar general of the Diocese of Tyler in East Texas, felt a call to ministry after completing his military service in Colombia. He went to seminary in Miami and continued his theological studies in Texas and Rome. In Tyler, nearly half of Catholics are Spanish speakers, he said.

“That was the reason I came to the United States, to serve the growing Spanish-speaking population in the Catholic Church,” he said.

“Now I am a bilingual, bicultural man, and I love to serve both communities,” he said. “But there is a great need for us here in the church, for priests.”

Many of the most prominent U.S. cardinals and archbishops are reaching retirement age, meaning Leo will have an opportunity to make personnel changes at the highest levels. Bishops are required to offer the pope their resignation at age 75, but the pope can choose whether to accept it for five years.

In Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich turned 77 in March, and in Newark, Cardinal Joseph Tobin turned 74 last week. Archbishops in Las Vegas, Miami and Santa Fe are all turning 76 this year.

Before Leo was elected pope, he ran the influential Vatican office responsible for choosing bishops. That expertise has allowed him to move quickly, and his relative youth means that he could significantly remake a generation of the church hierarchy, similar to the legacy of Pope John Paul II, said Christopher White, a senior fellow of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University.

In December, Leo replaced Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who turned 75 shortly before Francis died, and appointed Archbishop Ronald Hicks, 58, who also had a similar biography to Leo’s, with shared ministry experience and administrative skills.

A notable number of Leo’s new bishops, like many American priests and parishioners, were born in other countries.

Last June, Leo appointed Bishop Simon Peter Engurait, who was born in Uganda in 1971, the seventh of 14 children, to the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux in Louisiana.

About a third of priests in his diocese are foreign-born, many with green cards and some with religious worker visas, Bishop Engurait said.

“Back in the day, you had bishops from, for example, Ireland, because that is where most of the priests came from,” he said. Now, as more and more priests come from Latin America and Africa, the makeup of the bishops is also changing.

One of his hopes is to integrate the range of diverse Catholic communities in his diocese, which includes many African Americans and a significant Hispanic and South Asian population, though very few Africans, he noted.

Recently, Hispanic Catholics had a celebration of the Virgin Mary, including traditions from places like Nicaragua, Puerto Rico and Mexico, and he wished other immigrant cultures in the dioceses were represented to share their own flavors of Catholicism, he said.

Leo’s focus on the universality of the church is a central gift for parishes, he noted.

“I personally believe that God gives us leaders for a time, for a season,” he said, adding that Leo has “a beautiful recognition and appreciation of the global human family.”

Shortly after his own installation mass, Bishop Engurait traveled to participate in the installation of another Leo-appointed bishop in his cohort, Bishop Pedro Bismarck Chau, an auxiliary in Newark who was born in Nicaragua and became a U.S. citizen in seminary.

Leo is continuing a trend that Pope Francis started, elevating priests who have what Francis called “the smell of the sheep,” Bishop Chau said.

Many in Leo’s cohort of new bishops came up as parish priests, meaning they have extensive on-the-ground pastoral experience as opposed to having primarily worked in diocesan offices or adjacent ministries, he noted.

In September, Bishop Chau will go with fellow newly appointed bishops to Rome for what they jokingly call “Baby Bishop School,” an annual Vatican program for that year’s bishop class, and meet Leo for the first time. His own appointment process began while Francis was still alive and Leo, then Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, was still in his former role leading the bishops’ office.

“He saw my paperwork, he brought that paperwork to Pope Francis, that’s the interesting part of it,” Bishop Chau said. “I can’t wait to talk to him about it.”

Bobby Cox, the Baseball Hall of Fame manager who led the Atlanta Braves to five National League pennants and a World Series championship in the 1990s and was ranked No. 4 for career victories among major league managers, died on Saturday in Marietta, Ga. He was 84.

The team announced the death but provided no further details. Cox had a stroke in 2019 that impaired the use of his right arm.

Cox himself was a major league player whose career consisted of two seasons, mostly at third base, with the Yankees in 1968 and 1969. He batted .225 overall in 220 games and was hampered by knee problems.

He found his niche as a manager, mostly for the Braves in two stints surrounding a stretch with the Toronto Blue Jays. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014 as “one of the most successful managers in history” for steering the Braves to dominance in the 1990s.

Cox’s 2,504 victories in 29 seasons have been exceeded only by three others: Connie Mack, with 3,731, managing the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years, followed by John McGraw with 2,763 and Tony La Russa with 2,728. Cox was voted manager of the year four times by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

Cox’s Braves boasted strong pitching, most notably from the Hall of Famers Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz. His Atlanta teams won division championships 14 consecutive times, from 1991 to 2005, a players’ strike having curtailed the 1994 season.

But they didn’t capture his lone World Series championship until 1995, when they defeated the Cleveland Indians in six games, with the clincher coming on a 1-0 victory behind Glavine’s one-hitter and David Justice’s sixth-inning home run.

The Braves were bested in the Series by the Minnesota Twins in 1991, the Blue Jays in 1992 and the Yankees in 1996 and 1999.

After the Braves captured the 1995 Series title, Cox expressed resentment over frequent references in previous years to his never having reached baseball’s pinnacle.

“That’s all they ever talk about,” he told The New York Times. “Fran Tarkenton never won a Super Bowl. He’s one of the greatest quarterbacks ever. He talks about having a little luck occasionally, too.”

Cox regarded himself as a players’ manager and was well liked by his teams.

“I can get on a player, and have, as good as anybody in the world,” he told The Times during the 1999 World Series. “But certainly, when we leave, we understand each other, and it hasn’t been printed and nobody knows about it. At least most of the cases.”

Robert Joe Cox was born on May 21, 1941, in Tulsa, Okla., and grew up in Selma, Calif., near Fresno. His father, J.T. Cox, was an electrician for a pump company, and his mother, Willie Mae (Hendrix) Cox, was a store clerk.

Bobby played for his high school baseball team, and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ organization signed him in 1959 as an amateur free agent. He remained in the minor leagues until the Yankees obtained him in a December 1967 trade from the Braves’ organization. He debuted in the major leagues the following year.

Cox managed in the Yankee farm system from 1971 to 1976. He then became the Yankees’ first-base coach under the manager, Billy Martin, in 1977 when the team defeated the Dodgers in the World Series.

He replaced Dave Bristol as the manager of the floundering Braves in 1978. The Braves’ only winning season under Cox came in 1980, when they were 81-80. He was fired after the strike-shortened 1981 season.

He had better success managing the Blue Jays, which had entered the American League as a 1977 expansion team. He took them to 99-62 record in 1985, though they lost to the Kansas City Royals in the seven-game league championship series after taking a 3-to-1 game lead.

Cox was fired afterward, then served as the Braves’ general manager from 1985 to 1990. During that tenure, he drafted third baseman Chipper Jones, another future Hall of Famer, and traded for Smoltz.

Cox replaced Russ Nixon as the Braves’ manager in June 1990 while remaining as general manager. John Schuerholz took over the front office after that season, and they proved to be a highly successful tandem.

While 1995 was a triumphant season for Cox, he was in the news in connection with a troubling family matter in May of that year. His wife, Pamela, called the police to their home after they had argued the night following a game. The police said she told an officer that her husband had hit her in the face. Cox was arrested on a battery charge, then quickly released on $1,000 bail.

The next day, at a news conference arranged by the Braves, Pamela Cox retracted the allegation. Under a court arrangement, Cox enrolled in anger-management counseling, and his wife attended a program for battered women. Early in September, upon completion of those obligations, the charge against Cox was dismissed.

He and his wife, Pamela (Boswell) Cox, had three daughters. He also had five children from an earlier marriage, to Mary Xavier, that ended in divorce. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Cox retired as the Braves’ manager following the 2010 season but continued to serve as an adviser. He also became an executive with a bank in the Rome, Ga., area.

Apart from the wins-losses column, Cox set a record for an arcane statistic, having been ejected from 162 games long before managerial challenges of most questionable calls could be settled by video replays, avoiding chest-to-chest arguments.

Most of the time, Cox was protecting his players from ejections by shouldering their anger, and there were evidently no hard feelings on the part of the umps.

“The umpires have the utmost respect for Bobby Cox,” the umpire Richie Garcia told The Associated Press in 2007. “What happens one night isn’t carried over to the next.”

As the umpire Bob Davidson put it, “If I was a ballplayer, I’d want to play for Bobby Cox.”