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Cardinal Michael Czerny continues to be the best English-language interview in the Catholic Church.

The Jesuit prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development is the cardinal most fluent in the social-justice grammar this papacy is being built on.

Czech-born and Canadian-raised, Czerny has served in Toronto, where he founded the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice, at the University of Central America in El Salvador, in Nairobi as founding head of the African Jesuit AIDS Network, and then in Rome at the inner core of Pope Francis’s curia and now Pope Leo XIV’s.

CBS News released a new sit-down yesterday between Czerny and Norah O’Donnell — roughly seven minutes on Pope Leo XIV’s first year, the moral case for the American bishops’ defense of migrants, the Church’s growing posture on artificial intelligence, and the line between political responsibility and partisan posture.

The conversation was recorded in early April — the week Donald Trump launched his now-famous tirade against Pope Leo in response to the CBS joint interview with Cardinals Blase Cupich, Robert McElroy, and Joseph Tobin that had the same night.

For nearly six weeks, the tape sat in CBS’s vault before going public this morning, dropping into a different news cycle with all the political wreckage of the past few weeks behind it.

I have followed Czerny’s back-and-forths with O’Donnell over the past few years closely. The pattern is steady: I never leave one of these interviews without learning something I didn’t walk in with.

The first thing to know about Czerny — what makes him such a strong English-language voice for Pope Leo’s mission — is that he refuses to play inside the cramped binaries American journalists keep handing him.

The pattern was on full display in his sit-down with O’Donnell a year ago, between Pope Francis’s funeral and the conclave that elected Leo. O’Donnell asked Czerny whether the cardinals were facing a choice of “continuity or change.”

Czerny refused the premise on the spot. “I can’t accept that question as it is,” he told her. “The choice is not between continuity and change. The choice is to go forward. And that includes both continuity and change. That has always been our way forward.”

In the new interview, he does it again. O’Donnell asks how the new pope is “fitting into that” — meaning continuity and change. Czerny answers gently but firmly: “It always includes continuity and change. That was not a very special insight. That’s just how every election of every pope — ”

He didn’t finish the sentence. The premise itself was the problem.

The pattern reappeared in a separate interview Czerny gave a year ago with EWTN’s Montse Alvarado, who tried to get him to confirm that the cardinals had been “checking boxes” — canon law expertise, global diplomacy, evangelization — as they discerned the next pope.

Czerny declined the framing. “We’re not checking boxes,” he replied. “We’re trying to get a sense of who can lead the Church in our mission of evangelization, beginning in 2025.”

When Alvarado then asked about migration, Czerny pushed the question further out: “Work is a greater issue than migration. Work affects most of us.” The choice of the name Leo, he reminded her, was a deliberate reach back to Leo XIII — the pope of Rerum Novarum and the dignity of labor.

He pulls the same move when O’Donnell asks how Pope Leo has “empowered” the American bishops to speak out on migration. “It’s exactly the other way around,” he replies.

“The bishops don’t need the Holy Father to empower them. They are empowered, and they are doing what their vocation and mission asks them to do, which is to respond to the challenges, the big challenges, the important challenges facing their people.”

That answer matters. Cardinal Cupich in Chicago, Cardinal McElroy in Washington, and Cardinal Tobin in Newark did not need a permission slip from the new pope to defend the gospel against Donald Trump’s ICE raids — they were already empowered by their ordination.

Pope Leo, in Czerny’s telling, does what a good pope does: he supports them as they do their job.

O’Donnell then asks Czerny whether the bishops’ migrant advocacy might be seen as “political.” His answer follows.

“Life is political,” Czerny tells her. “It’s not either political or not political. It is political because life is political. Political is how we live together and how we face our problems together. We can’t be non-political. We don’t have to be partisan, but let’s not get confused between partisan and political. Political means taking responsibility for our world and for its problems, especially as they affect those who are weakest.

“That’s politics. Everybody’s responsible for that. You don’t have to be a Christian. You just have to be a human being, and you’re responsible for what’s happening to your brothers and sisters.”

This is the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a few breaths.

Catholics are called to be political because politics is taking responsibility for the people God has placed alongside us, and the refusal to abandon a neighbor is the most political act there is.

Opting out of that work, Czerny argues, means opting out of being human — never mind being Christian.

When O’Donnell asks why American Catholics seem to have shifted on migrants in the past year, Czerny gives her one sentence.

“Because people have experienced,” he replies, “that the migrants who have in many different ways become really our brothers and sisters are being cruelly treated. And we say, ‘No, you don’t treat my brother or sister like that.’”

That is the entire moral argument of the American Catholic immigration fight, compressed into a single line by a Jesuit who has lived this struggle on every continent.

On artificial intelligence — the subject of Pope Leo’s AI encyclical to be released on Memorial Day — Czerny previews where the Church is headed.

“What we’re going to hear is a message of both challenge and reassurance,” he says.

“The challenge is that we need to take responsibility — we, not just a few — for artificial intelligence. We have to struggle against certain control that is exercised now by a few in order to take human responsibility for this. But also the sense that, just like previous revolutions, the benefits of this revolution can and should and must reach all of us, not just a few.”

Those sentences are the philosophical core of Pope Leo’s papacy — on labor, on AI, on Silicon Valley’s wealth, on every revolution headed our way. The benefits of human progress and the responsibility for stewarding it both belong to the whole human family rather than a small group of owners.

Read Pope Leo’s encyclical alongside Czerny’s preview and you will see exactly where the Church is heading.

Czerny continues to be the best English-language interview in the Catholic Church because he refuses to let the question shape the answer. The gospel demands a particular reply, and that — not the version the questioner wants — is what comes out of his mouth.

Catholic social teaching, in his treatment of it, has real weight: a body of doctrine that issues actual verdicts on the immigration fight, the political-versus-partisan question, and the demands of love of neighbor at the southern border.

He is the English-language interlocutor this American Catholic moment desperately needs. America has spent the past year watching its government brutalize migrants, threaten foreign nations, and turn cruelty into a campaign aesthetic.

Interviewed by O’Donnell the week Donald Trump publicly attacked the new American pope, Czerny gave the country the reply the gospel actually demands.

“If we just stay home and complain,” the cardinal warns, “or stay on our phones and complain, our world is going to become more and more and more messed up.”

I will keep watching Czerny’s interviews. Each one teaches me something I didn’t bring into it.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal Czerny and every bishop, priest, religious sister, and lay Catholic who refuses to let American politics conscript the gospel and refuses, equally, to surrender the gospel’s claim on American politics.

The Catholic Church is not a partisan vendor — she is the human family insisting on the dignity of every one of her members, especially the ones being thrown into unmarked vans, separated from their children, and shipped to foreign jails.

In an era poisoned by cruelty and bound by binaries that flatten faith into team colors, this community holds the line by refusing both fear and false neutrality. Catholics from every parish, people of goodwill from every other tradition, and human beings with eyes to see the migrants being terrorized — together, not a few — are taking responsibility for the people God has placed alongside us.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because hundreds of thousands of Americans are hungry for a faith that takes responsibility — for migrants, for workers, for a world that AI may reshape beyond recognition — without ever pretending the gospel is above the fight.

If you believe this work matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a politics that has decided to brutalize the weakest among us — I am asking you to join us.

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Pope Leo XIV stepped into the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace on Friday morning and told scholars gathered at the Vatican for “Preserving Human Voices and Faces,” an international conference on artificial intelligence, that the technology has produced “an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human.”

The line was the centerpiece of Friday’s address, which the Vatican posted on social media within hours of delivery. The pope spent the rest of the speech sketching the argument readers will see in full on Monday.

“The challenge we currently face,” Leo told the conference, “is not technological, but anthropological.”

That sentence is likely the thesis of the document — the first papal encyclical on artificial intelligence in the history of the Church.

Here’s what we know.

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Sister Mary Meline told NBC News that ultra-Orthodox men spit at her nearly every time she walks through Jerusalem.

“The spitting on the ground for me it’s every time I go to Jerusalem nearly,” she said in a Richard Engel report that aired last week from the Old City.

Engel documented what the Christian clergy of the Holy Land have warned about for years, and what most American media has refused to cover with any seriousness: attacks by Jewish extremists against Christians — clergy, nuns, parish priests, pilgrims — are escalating sharply, and the Israeli government does little to stop it.

The Rossing Center, which tracks anti-Christian violence in Israel and East Jerusalem, recorded sixty-one physical attacks against Christians in 2025 alone.

The list includes spitting, pepper spray, beatings, and the May attack on a French nun caught on CCTV outside the Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion — an assault I wrote about earlier this month.

The perpetrators are usually ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, NBC reports. The harassment is so normalized that some clergy hide their crosses when they leave their churches.

Jerusalem’s Christian population has collapsed from roughly 25% of the city a century ago to less than 2% today.

That is what the demographic line of a persecution looks like when you graph it.

This is the world Pope Leo XIV inherited from his predecessor, and one he has refused to leave alone.

In July, after the Israeli army shelled Holy Family Parish, the only Catholic church in Gaza, killing three people and wounding the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, Leo received a call from Benjamin Netanyahu.

The pope used the call to demand an immediate ceasefire, the protection of all holy places, and an end to what he later called the “barbarity” of the Gaza war. The prime minister hung up and continued the war.

Pope Francis was just as vocal. He wrote in a 2024 book that what was happening in Gaza had “the characteristics of a genocide” — the first sitting pope to use the word against Israeli conduct. From his hospital bed in his final months, Francis called Holy Family Parish in Gaza nearly every night, sometimes twice, until his death last spring. He told one Vatican audience: “This is cruelty. This is not war.”

Leo has not retreated an inch from that line. Here’s the background.

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On May 5, three days before the first anniversary of Pope Leo XIV’s election, the Vatican released a document with a title built to put readers to sleep: “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues.”

Within forty-eight hours, James Martin had called it historic, Cardinal Gerhard Müller had branded it heretical, and Father Gerald Murray, speaking on EWTN, used the word horrific.

The reason is buried in two appendices.

Here is what Study Group 9 is, and what its report actually does.

The body and the assignment

Study Group 9 is one of ten committees Pope Francis spun out of the Synod on Synodality in early 2024.

Each was handed a question the synod assembly could not finish in the room. Group 9 drew the hardest topic — what the Vatican initially labeled “controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues.” Same-sex relations sat at the top of the list. The role of women, divorce and remarriage, and questions of conscience were also on the docket.

The group’s chair is Cardinal Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio, the Peruvian archbishop of Lima. Robert Prevost — the missionary who spent nearly four decades in Peru before becoming Pope Leo XIV — knows him well.

The committee’s first symbolic act came before publication. It renamed its own assignment. “Controversial issues” became “emerging issues.” Group 9 wrote that the change was meant to register a “paradigm shift” away from a Church that hands down rulings and toward a Church that learns by listening.

What the report says

Most of the report is procedural. It argues that Catholic moral reasoning should begin with the lived experience of the faithful rather than with abstract principles applied downward. The committee calls this the “principle of pastorality” and traces the term to Vatican II and to John XXIII’s opening address at the council.

The document changes nothing in Catholic doctrine. No new moral pronouncement on homosexuality appears, no same-sex unions are blessed, and the Catechism is left intact.

What Group 9 proposes is a method: theological commissions at the diocesan and national level should sit with LGBT Catholics, hear them out, study the relevant scripture passages, consult the human sciences, and report back through the synodal structure. The implementation timeline runs from this summer through an Ecclesial Assembly at the Vatican in October 2028.

The novelty is in two annexes.

For the first time in a Vatican document, two gay men were given space to speak in their own voices, without an intermediary. Their names were withheld in the published text, but the U.S. testimony belongs to Jason Steidl-Jack, a theologian at Fordham who has written publicly about his life and his marriage.

The Portuguese author recounts a spiritual director who “suggested I could have been married to a woman to ‘find peace’ and ‘use my gifts,’ since marriage is not ‘just about sexuality.’”

He calls the advice “a suggestion to harm a woman by robbing her of the chance to be completely loved and desired, all to fulfill a social expectation.” Steidl-Jack writes from the other side of the ocean: “My sexuality isn’t a perversion, disorder, or cross; it’s a gift from God. I have a happy, healthy marriage and am flourishing as an openly gay Catholic.”

The report does not bury the Courage accusation. The ministry is identified on the page.

“The testimony first describes the problematic membership in a Catholic group (Courage) which, by pushing for ‘reparative therapy,’ had the effect of separating faith and sexuality,” the document reads.

Steidl-Jack tells the story in his own words: “I joined Courage, an apostolate that works with those who ‘suffer from same-sex attraction.’ The group came at the suggestion of a conversion therapist I met to deal with my ‘condition.’”

The meetings, he writes, were “secretive and hidden. The people I met were lonely, hopeless, and often depressed.”

The report, drawing across both testimonies, describes what it calls “the devastating effects of reparative therapies aimed at recovering heterosexuality” and the “contradictory advice received” from clergy — from those who push reparative therapy to those who, “even more gravely,” counsel a gay man to enter the sacrament of marriage with a woman.

The pushback

Within ten days of publication, the General Secretariat of the Synod issued a statement that the reports “cannot be attributed to the General Secretariat” and described them as “working documents.”

The Secretariat said its role had been “limited solely to the translation of the summaries, the editing of the reports and their publication and dissemination, in order to be consistent with the spirit of transparency and accountability that has characterized the synodal process.” Critics read this as a quiet washing of hands.

Then came the Sister Josée Ngalula problem. The Congolese theologian who served as the lone African member of Study Group 9 told the National Catholic Register that she did not help draft the homosexuality text.

Sister Ngalula said she focused on the report’s section on non-violence — closer to “my African context, shaped by wars” — and declined to enter the debate on homosexual persons because, in her telling, “this is not a major pastoral issue in my community.”

The committee that proposed listening to LGBT Catholics ended up hearing only from two men.

Steidl-Jack himself names the absence inside the published testimony. “Patriarchy is a problem for my lesbian Catholic sisters,” he writes. “While gay men may feel at home in my parish, lesbian Catholics are often ignored. Few gay women attend because they see no one in leadership who can relate to their experiences. The Body of Christ is hurting because these women are overlooked.”

In my mind, none of this lessens the significance of the document. It reminds me of what Pope Leo XIV has already said more than once.

As part of his Magna Carta address to synod working groups last October, Leo told the Church that “we have to understand that we do not all run at the same speed, and sometimes we have to be patient with one another, rather than a few people running ahead and leaving a lot behind, which could cause even a break in an ecclesial experience.”

He had been more direct a month earlier, in a September interview with Crux pegged to Elise Allen’s biography, as Outreach summarized: “I think we have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.”

Michael Lofton, the conservative Catholic apologist at Reason & Theology, flagged the pattern in a video last fall. Leo was telling the Church the order of operations: a change of heart precedes a change of text.

I have written about this theme before — in November, when I covered Pope Leo’s meeting with a prominent married gay couple in Rome, and in December, with his appointment of an LGBTQ-affirming bishop to lead the Diocese of Monterey.

Brian and Alex, the Monterey appointment, and Study Group 9 share the same architecture: a public gesture, a private pastoral message, no doctrinal text changed. The Church is being asked to learn what its people are actually living before it tries to write down what it believes about them.

Where Pope Leo XIV stands

Leo has issued no statement on the report. The text was published over the Vatican seal — neither endorsed nor blocked by the pope. But we do have a good sense of where he stands on it. Here’s the evidence.

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On the evening of May 15, Cardinal Michael Czerny celebrated a Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba at the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rome — and from the altar, delivered the Vatican’s answer to the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against Cuba.

Eight days earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had crossed the Tiber to meet Pope Leo XIV in the Apostolic Palace. The U.S. statement on the meeting stayed vague, describing “cordial discussions.”

The Vatican’s readout was more specific, naming the disagreements the Holy See had pressed with the secretary of state. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, had told reporters the day before that Trump’s recent attacks on Leo struck him as “a bit strange.”

On the same day as his audience with the pope, Rubio announced a fresh round of sanctions targeting GAESA — the military-controlled conglomerate that anchors Cuba’s economy. He wrapped the move in humanitarian language, pointing to $6 million already routed through Caritas Cuba and promising more if Havana cooperated.

Trump was less restrained. From the Oval Office earlier this month, the president suggested that a U.S. aircraft carrier returning from Iran could stop “about 100 yards offshore” of Cuba, where “they’ll say ‘thank you very much, we give up.’” In March he predicted he would soon have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

According to a CNN review of flight data, surveillance flights off the island’s coast have surged since February. Havana’s foreign ministry called the new sanctions “collective punishment of a genocidal nature.”

This was the diplomatic terrain Czerny stepped onto when he approached the ambo on Friday night.

The Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba was organized by the Cuban Embassy to the Holy See, and Czerny — the Jesuit prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the pope’s senior voice on migration and global justice — chose his words knowing every line would be parsed by the State Department, by Havana, and by the Vatican’s own diplomats.

Here’s what he said.

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On Monday, I reached out to CBS with a single question: would Stephen Colbert close The Late Show on Thursday night with an interview of Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pope?

They declined to comment. The silence has done nothing to slow the rumor. Colbert himself has already named the guest he wanted before his show ended: in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, he called Pope Leo XIV his “white whale” — the dream booking he was still chasing in the final weeks of The Late Show.

According to Deadline’s reporting on the closing run, the announced guests for the final week include Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, and Bruce Springsteen. The Thursday slot — the final broadcast, the slot CBS traditionally reserves for the biggest moment — remains a mystery.

As I wrote earlier this year, Stephen Colbert and Pope Leo XIV are arguably the two most beloved Americans in public life right now.

Both have spent decades being publicly Catholic in a country that prefers its religion either privatized or weaponized, and millions of Americans have stayed with them for offering a third option. A conversation between them, on the last Thursday night on one of the only late-night shows that ever took the Gospel seriously, would have the feel of a homecoming rather than a curtain call.

To understand why, you have to start with the worst day of his life.

On September 11, 1974, Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crashed in dense fog on its approach to Charlotte. Seventy-two of the eighty-two people on board died.

Among them were James William Colbert Jr., a beloved physician and dean at the Medical University of South Carolina, and two of his sons — Paul, who was eighteen, and Peter, who was fifteen. James and the boys were flying north so the brothers could begin the school year at the Canterbury School in Connecticut.

Stephen was ten years old, the youngest of eleven children. He has said the world after the crash felt like a place where he simply walked around waiting for the next loss.

His mother, Lorna, refused to let grief swallow the family. According to Good Faith Media, she told her grieving son that he should not despair, because there was nothing the world could do to him that God had not already endured. That sentence shaped his theology before he could shave.

Years later, in an Anderson Cooper interview that has been watched tens of millions of times, Colbert told the CNN anchor that he had come to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

Grief, he said, introduces you to a God who has already met every variety of it. The full conversation with Cooper, conducted for CNN’s All There Is podcast on grief, is the most extended public account Colbert has given of how the crash made him a Catholic capable of comedy.

College knocked the certainty out of him. Colbert drifted through Hampden-Sydney and then Northwestern, and by his early twenties he had stopped believing altogether. He has described that period as cold, in every sense.

One winter morning in Chicago, walking down the street, a Gideon volunteer handed him a pocket New Testament. Colbert opened it to the index — under Anxiety, it pointed him to Matthew V, the Sermon on the Mount. The verse that struck him was Jesus asking who among the worried can add a single hour to his life by worrying — the same passage where Jesus tells anxious people to consider the lilies of the field.

Something cracked open. He has called it a mystical return, an unbidden recognition that the words had been waiting for him longer than he had been gone. He walked into the next chapter of his life a practicing Catholic again, and he never left.

The faith he came back to is built around a crucifix. Colbert has spoken often about why he prefers the bloodied figure to the polished empty beam, and he is unapologetic about it.

A crucifix keeps Christ’s body on the wood, which is the version Colbert needs — a reminder that suffering was endured before resurrection was offered. He looks to it for what he calls solidarity, the assurance that a God who hung on a cross is not embarrassed by the wreckage in our lives.

The crucifix taught him to read human pain as the exact place where God chooses to be most present.

He brought all of this with him into comedy. At The Colbert Report he played a blowhard cable-news pundit who was also, inconveniently for the satire, a daily-Mass Catholic who taught Sunday school in real life.

Colbert testified before Congress in character about migrant farmworkers and quoted Matthew 25 with a straight face. He interviewed bishops, biblical scholars, and at least one cardinal on a stage built mostly for political punchlines.

When he moved to The Late Show in 2015, he carried the same habit of mind. He has prayed on air with guests and wept with them when the conversation took that turn. Other times he has pressed unbelievers gently toward the questions that scare them most.

The exchange with Andrew Garfield about losing a parent has been watched tens of millions of times for a reason — there was no host underneath the suit, just a man who knows what mourning costs.

The clearest articulation Colbert has ever given of how his Catholicism feeds his comedy came in February 2022, when Dua Lipa turned the tables on him and asked, on his own show, whether his faith and his work ever overlap.

His words that night ring in my ears. Here’s what he said:

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On Sunday, May 17, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the retired archbishop of New York, and Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lent their voices to “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” the Trump-backed prayer festival on the National Mall. Barron took the stage in person, while Dolan participated via a pre-recorded video.

The event was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership with the White House.

The program featured Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard by video, alongside evangelist Franklin Graham, White House faith adviser Paula White-Cain, Eric Metaxas, and pastor Robert Jeffress. PBS reported in advance that the gathering had been criticized for promoting Christian nationalism.

Father Mike Schmitz, the Minnesota priest whose “Bible in a Year” podcast has built one of the largest Catholic audiences in America, was originally announced as a speaker. In early April, his team informed the White House he would be unable to attend. The lineup that emerged in his absence made clear why his judgment was sound.

Anyone tuning in expecting an ecumenical day of national prayer encountered something else: a stage built by Christians who have spent decades telling American Catholics their Church is a fraud.

Consider the two most visible of them.

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One week from today, in the Vatican’s Synod Hall, Pope Leo XIV will unveil Magnifica Humanitas — magnificent humanity — the first papal encyclical on artificial intelligence in the history of the Church.

The pope signed the document on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s foundational encyclical on labor and capital at the dawn of the first industrial revolution. The dating is a thesis statement in itself.

The release date is Memorial Day. I keep joking that the pope is determined to put American Catholic commentators to work on every US holiday as punishment for our bad takes.

He spent Thanksgiving Day on the papal plane to Turkey, accepting pumpkin pies from American journalists on the way. He has now picked Memorial Day for the most consequential document of his papacy.

And on July 4 — the day America turns 250 — the pope will be on Lampedusa rather than anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. The Vatican has gently let it be known that he is not planning to visit the United States this year.

It is the kind of calendar that would keep a less stubborn commentariat at the cookout. We are not that commentariat.

Now to the substance.

The Two Details the Wire Copy Will Miss

The Holy See released the press conference rollout this morning, and a careful reader should notice two things.

Start with who shows up. Pope Leo himself will be in the room. That isn’t standard. Encyclicals normally get presented by curial cardinals or by the prefect of the relevant dicastery, with the pope usually absent completely. He is rarely, if ever, present in person.

The pope’s choice to take the podium on Memorial Day — and to introduce the document and provide his own commentary on it — means he plans to tell the world personally what this text is for. He won’t let the press take first crack at interpreting it. And he won’t let partisan forces in the United States, on either side of our politics, hijack the message before the ink is dry.

Then look at who is standing next to him. Christopher Olah, the Anthropic co-founder known across the AI world for his pioneering work on neural-network interpretability, will be sharing the day with Pope Leo XIV and speaking at the event when the document is announced.

Most people outside the inner workings of the Vatican don’t realize how unusual this choice is. In February, Anthropic refused to grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to its models. The Trump administration responded by directing federal agencies to stop using the company’s products and designating Anthropic a supply chain risk — the first American firm to wear that label, a category historically reserved for foreign adversaries.

The company, by any practical measure, is on the wrong side of the Trump White House right now because of this situation. Pope Leo XIV has chosen them as his partner anyway — not in defiance of the Trump administration, but to show that there are willing partners in Silicon Valley ready to work with the Church for the good of humanity.

A Question Christian Ethicists Are Already Asking

A third detail the wires won’t catch: in April, the Washington Post reported that Anthropic itself had quietly hosted about fifteen Catholic and Protestant leaders at a two-day summit at its San Francisco headquarters, asking among other things whether Claude could be understood as a child of God.

The question sounds like seminar fodder. It is, in fact, the central question of the next hundred years. The Church’s answer is unequivocal.

No matter how sophisticated the system becomes, a synthetic mind will never be a human being, and it will never carry the dignity of the human person. The human person retains supremacy in God’s eyes over every artifact we have built, including the most powerful ones.

Through my own reporting, I can tell the reader the pope has insisted on one thing above everything else. This encyclical cannot be overly theoretical. It has to be relevant to the people building this technology and to the people using it every day.

The document is not allowed to drift in the cloud as a beautiful abstraction, gathering dust on a Vatican shelf with the rest of the magisterial commentary nobody reads. It has to be meaningful to the people building this technology and to the people working on the guardrails surrounding it.

He wants a tool the builders can pick up the morning after publication and put to work that same afternoon.

What the Encyclical Will Actually Argue

Last week’s Letters from Leo essay on Rerum Novarum sketched the template — Leo XIII’s 1891 document that did for the labor question what the new encyclical proposes to do for the AI question. The themes carry over: labor displacement, the surveillance economy, the children’s algorithms, and the unresolved problem of whether autonomous weapons can ever be reconciled with just war doctrine.

Every one of those issues will be on the page. Here’s what we expect.

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Dear friends,

Letters from Leo is publishing a series of scripture reflections for paid subscribers through the Easter season, drawing on the teachings of Pope Leo XIV and the daily readings of the Church.

These reflections are “quieter” than my usual essays. They are prayers as much as arguments — meditations on what the lectionary asks of us in the weeks between Easter and Pentecost. The aim is the same as everything else I do here: to make the Gospel inescapable in ordinary life.

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Today’s Readings

“Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.” — Acts 1:11

In John’s account of Easter morning, the first words the risen Jesus speaks to anyone are a refusal.

Mary Magdalene has just turned around and recognized him in the garden. She lunges to grab him. He stops her cold. “Do not cling to me,” he says, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

I have read that line a hundred times, and it has always challenged me. It sounds harsh on a morning of pure mercy.

The woman who stayed through the crucifixion, who came to the tomb in the dark, who wept until heaven looked back at her — and the first thing the risen Lord tells her is to keep her hands off?

The Ascension does not soften this.

The instruction is bigger than a rebuke. Mary’s risen Lord is asking her to let him be larger than she has known him. The Jesus she had was always too small for who he actually is, and if she clings, she will keep her version of him while the real one slips past her. So he asks her to open her hands.

The Ascension is what makes this possible. It is the moment Jesus refuses to be contained by any cage we have built for him.

Pope Leo XIV preached this morning about this mystery and our obligation not to narrow God’s love. Here’s what he said and why it matters.

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Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester sat for Fox News this week to do what he has been doing for months — attack American Democrats, defend American capitalism, and step around the Catholic teachings he finds inconvenient.

The interview aired two days before Rededicate 250, the controversial Trump-backed prayer event Barron will headline on Sunday on the National Mall alongside Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is delivering the video address.

Father Mike Schmitz, originally listed as a speaker, prudently removed his name from the partisan lineup last month — and we will have more to say about the event tomorrow.

His targets on Fox were Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and an unnamed group of fellow Catholics in Rome who, in Barron’s telling, had irritated him by quoting Pope Francis.

“Sometimes when I was over in Rome for the synod on synodality,” Barron told Fox, “I would hear people talking about the economy that kills. And the reference was to capitalism. I would say the economy that kills — socialism is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people the last 100 years or so.”

The economy that kills carried the central social thesis of the Francis pontificate — his enduring critique of a culture of indifference, not the synodal chatter Barron makes it sound like on Fox.

Pope Francis issued Evangelii Gaudium in November 2013. Section 53 reads: “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”

Francis returned to the phrase for the next decade — in addresses to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, to executives gathered at the Vatican, to young economists at the Assisi gathering he convened in 2022. It became the moral signature of his papacy.

A Catholic bishop should not need to be told this. The man holding that office, with a worldwide media platform, regular travel to Rome for Vatican synods, and the chairmanship of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, certainly should not.

Yet on Fox News, with the Rededicate 250 stage two days away, Barron treated Francis’s defining critique of capitalism as the muttering of unnamed synod attendees whose theology he had come to correct.

Consider the timing. Donald Trump has attacked Pope Leo XIV publicly more than once in the past month — accusing the pope of “endangering a lot of Catholics,” threatening retaliation, and telling Catholic audiences he would have done things differently if he were not in the White House.

Asked by Fox News this week to name the principal threat facing religion in America, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester did not mention the president, the war, or the deportation flights. The threat he named was “wokeism.”

The Fox interview ranged wider than Francis. Here’s what happened.

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The verdict came in this past week, and it wasn’t close.

A new ABC News–Washington Post–Ipsos poll, fielded April 24 to 28 and released May 6, found Pope Leo XIV with a 41 percent favorable rating among American adults and only 16 percent unfavorable.

Two-thirds of the country — 66 percent — said they reacted positively to Leo’s appeal that Americans contact Congress to work for peace and reject war.

The same poll caught Donald Trump in freefall.

His job-approval number cratered to 37 percent, with 62 percent disapproving — the lowest reading of his second term. The strikes on Iran were called a mistake by 61 percent of Americans. Nearly nine in ten reacted negatively to his recent post depicting himself as Jesus Christ. A clear 57 percent majority opposed his social-media swipe at the pope.

To this day, Trump has not picked up the phone to call Leo.

The numbers tell a story the White House would prefer to bury: across both faith and partisan divides, the American people have looked at the one-sided ‘fight’ between the pope and the president and chosen the pope.

It has been an extraordinary year for an American who once expected to live and die as a missionary in Peru.

When Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope on May 8, 2025, more than a few pundits predicted his American passport would prove a political liability. The first U.S.-born pontiff in history, ascending the throne of Peter under the shadow of MAGA — some assumed his standing in America would rise and fall with every Trumpian provocation.

It hasn’t.

Across the polling year — Pew measurements, Ipsos check-ins, and my own reporting just two weeks ago on his head-to-head numbers against Trump — Leo has held firm.

Through every assault on him from the right, from JD Vance’s attacks, Mike Johnson’s retorts, to the Iran war crisis, the pope has stood at roughly the same elevation in the American imagination.

Among Catholics, his numbers are more lopsided still: 61 percent favorable, just 14 percent unfavorable. Strongly favorable views outpace strongly unfavorable views among American Catholics by more than 12 to 1.

That stability is the headline that gets missed in Washington. In a town where political fortunes swing weekly with the news cycle, Leo’s standing has been remarkably resistant to every attempt to drag him into the mud.

The president has smeared him on Truth Social, propped up MAGA pastors who told Fox News the president knows the Bible better than the pope, and most recently dispatched Marco Rubio rather than face the Holy Father himself.

None of it has moved the dial.

What makes the gap with Trump more striking still is that Leo refuses to play the game. Here’s what I mean.

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One hundred thirty-five years ago today, Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum and gave the Catholic Church its public voice on the great social question of the modern world.

The document landed on May 15, 1891, into a world being remade by coal, steam, and the unregulated industrial economy. Workers were broken on the wheel of the new machinery. A handful of industrialists controlled wealth on a scale the world had never seen.

Across Europe, socialism rose with promises of deliverance and threats of its own to the human person. Leo XIII refused both extremes and wrote a sweeping encyclical that became the founding charter of modern Catholic social teaching.

Today, May 15, 2026, the rumors out of Rome say his namesake has done it again.

Multiple Catholic outlets are reporting that Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical this morning under the working title Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity.”

Two independent sources close to the situation tell me the Vatican will release the document publicly on May 25.

The Holy See has confirmed none of it. The title and the date should be treated as rumors until they are confirmed. But the parallels are too pointed to ignore.

When Robert Prevost stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s last May and announced he would be called Leo XIV, he told the College of Cardinals two days later exactly why he chose the name.

Leo XIII had answered the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum. He, Leo XIV, would answer the next one — driven this time by artificial intelligence, algorithmic management, and the automation of human labor.

The encyclical reportedly coming out is the long-awaited fulfillment of that promise.

If the rumors are right, Magnifica Humanitas will be to the AI age what Rerum Novarum was to the steam age — the Church’s attempt to defend the dignity of the human person against a machinery that threatens to reduce it to a commodity.

Reading the new encyclical without reading the old one will be like reading the second act of a play without knowing the first. Leo XIII set the stakes, the vocabulary, and the method. The early signals of Leo XIV’s pontificate suggest he is inheriting all three and applying them to a world Leo XIII never imagined but somehow anticipated.

To know what is coming out, you need to know what came on May 15, 1891. The questions a 19th-century Italian pope asked about coal, steam, and the wage worker recur in a 21st-century American pope’s reckoning with silicon, scale, and algorithmically managed labor.

The vocabulary survives because the threat to human dignity is structurally the same.

What follows is the essential explainer — the top things to understand about Rerum Novarum, the way it created the social magisterium of the modern Church, and the way it is already shaping the early pontificate of Pope Leo XIV in real time.

Six Things to Know About Rerum Novarum

Industrial capitalism had built the modern world in fifty years and broken millions of workers in the process. Socialism was rising in response. Leo XIII saw that both systems would reduce the human person to an instrument of production, and he wrote Rerum Novarum to refuse that reduction. Six core claims define the document.

The worker is a person, not a commodity. Labor cannot be treated as another input on a balance sheet. Each person has a right to what is required to live, and the poor can procure it only through their work. Dignity, not productivity, is the measure of just labor.

Workers have a right to organize. The encyclical defended the right of working people to form associations — what would become the modern labor unions — as a natural extension of free association. In an era when organizing was being violently suppressed, the claim was radical.

Property is a right, but a conditioned one. Leo XIII affirmed private property against socialist confiscation while insisting that property carries what later popes called a “social mortgage” — its use must serve the common good, not only the owner. The right to own does not include the right to hoard while neighbors starve.

The unrestrained market is not the Gospel. What do I mean?

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Two students approached Pope Leo XIV on Thursday morning as he stepped into the Divina Sapienza chapel at Rome’s largest university. They handed him a book of poems from Gaza, told him the project has raised two hundred thousand euros for Emergency’s medical work inside the strip, and asked him to read it. “Lo legga, quel libro, Santità,” one of them said.

Read it, Holy Father.

An hour later, in the Aula Magna of Sapienza — the largest institution of higher learning in Europe, home to more than 125,000 students — the pope named the arms race that Donald Trump has spent the past year forcing on the European continent.

“Let us not call ‘defense’ a rearmament that increases tensions and insecurity, impoverishes investment in education and health, denies trust in diplomacy, and enriches elites that care nothing for the common good,” Leo said.

Read that last clause again: “enriches elites that care nothing for the common good.” Papal addresses do not usually name the arms industry, even by indirection. This one did — a direct charge against the contractors and shareholders whose stock prices have climbed throughout 2025.

European military spending rose 14 percent in 2025 to $864 billion, the largest single-year jump since the Cold War ended, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The surge has been driven by the Russia-Ukraine war and by Trump’s relentless pressure on NATO members to spend more on weapons.

At his urging, NATO endorsed a defense spending target of 5 percent of GDP last year — more than double the level the alliance had asked of its members a decade ago. In February, the president signed an executive order re-prioritizing the U.S. weapons customer list to favor countries with higher defense budgets.

The pope’s sentence at Sapienza was a verdict on that entire architecture. Leo used the language of Catholic social teaching — the common good, the dignity of investment in schools and hospitals, the priority of diplomacy — to indict a transatlantic political class that has surrendered to militarization as the organizing principle of statecraft.

The rebuke was pointed and clear. Here’s the background.

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Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández — the Argentine theologian who runs the Vatican’s doctrinal office — issued a statement on Wednesday warning the right-wing ultratraditionalist Society of Saint Pius X that its planned July 1 consecration of four new bishops in Écône, Switzerland, would constitute “a schismatic act” and trigger automatic excommunication under canon law.

The Italian-language statement, released by the Holy See’s Press Office, ended any remaining ambiguity about where this pontificate stands on the Second Vatican Council.

Fernández wrote that a “formal adhesion to schism would constitute a grave offense against God,” and reported that Pope Leo “continues in his prayers to ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten the leaders of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X so that they may reconsider the extremely grave decision they have taken.”

Reconsider is the last word before the door closes.

This fight has been a year in the making, and the road to Wednesday’s statement runs back to May 10, 2025 — two days after the conclave — when Leo sat down with the cardinals who had elected him and delivered the speech that would set the direction of his pontificate.

“I would like us to renew together today our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council,” he said. He then named the document that would govern his interpretation of that path: Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

Leo went on to list the principles he intended to carry forward — the primacy of Christ in proclamation, missionary conversion of the Christian community, collegiality and synodality, attention to the sensus fidei in popular piety, loving care for the least and rejected, and courageous dialogue with the contemporary world.

That paragraph, delivered at the moment a new pope is most carefully read by his curia and his enemies, was the founding charter of the Leo papacy. Vatican II is not up for renegotiation under his pontificate, and Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium would be the lens through which it is read.

The traditionalist wing of the Church should’ve heard him as clearly as anyone else.

The SSPX has spent more than half a century arguing that the Second Vatican Council itself was a mistake — that its teachings on religious liberty, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, and the liturgy departed from the perennial teaching of the Church.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the society in 1970 to preserve what he called the Mass of all time. In 1988, after years of failed negotiations with Rome, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal mandate. John Paul II declared him excommunicated within hours.

The two surviving bishops Lefebvre consecrated in 1988 — Bernard Fellay and Alfonso de Galarreta, whose excommunications Benedict XVI lifted in 2009 — are the men expected to lay hands on the four new bishops at Écône on July 1. If they proceed, the canon kicks in automatically.

Both consecrators and consecrands incur the same penalty Lefebvre did. The society would tip into a formal schism that could pull more than half a million members, two existing bishops, more than seven hundred priests, and roughly two hundred seminarians across sixty countries out of canonical communion with Rome.

For decades, Rome has tried to find a way to keep the SSPX inside the tent. Here’s the background.

John Paul II opened talks in the 1990s; in 2007 Benedict XVI broadened permission for the Latin Mass through Summorum Pontificum, and in January 2009 he lifted the 1988 excommunications; and even Francis, no friend of the society’s theology, allowed SSPX priests to validly hear confessions and witness marriages. Each accommodation was one-sided — Rome moved, the society did not.

Wednesday made the cost of that posture explicit.

The chain of events that brought us to this week is worth following.

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Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For the better part of a year, Father Emilio Biosca Agüero has been watching his parishioners disappear.

The Shrine of the Sacred Heart, the Capuchin-run parish in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborh…

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Pope Leo XIV has named Mohammad Hossein Mokhtari, Iran’s ambassador to the Vatican, a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Pontifical Order of Pius IX, according to a certificate dated May 8 and signed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the pope’s Secretary of State.

The honor raises the Iranian envoy to one of the most senior classes of the highest active papal order, founded in 1847 by Pope Pius IX and conferred today on senior diplomats and heads of state.

By itself, the award is not unusual. By Vatican custom, the Grand Cross is ordinarily conferred on resident ambassadors to the Holy See after roughly two years in post, and Mokhtari presented his credentials to Pope Francis in December 2023 — two and a half years before Cardinal Parolin signed this certificate.

But Iranian state media is not treating this as a routine retirement honor. PressTV and the West Asia News Agency are running the certificate alongside images of Mokhtari with Pope Leo XIV, framing the medal as a counter-signal from an American pope to a wartime American president — a quiet diplomatic verdict on Donald Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran

The timing is for them the story.

Top conservatives in the United States seem to agree. Some went to X (formerly Twitter) to express their dismay, including Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.

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In the Oval Office today, asked about Jimmy Lai — the 78-year-old Catholic publisher of Apple Daily, now serving year five of a twenty-year sentence in a Hong Kong maximum-security prison — Donald Trump compared him to Jim Comey.

“It’s like saying to me, ‘If Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’” the president told reporters, on camera. “That might be a hard one for me, because he’s a dirty cop.”

Trump caught himself — “But Jimmy Lai isn’t that way” — yet the analogy itself, equating Xi’s grip on Lai with his own pursuit of Comey, hands Beijing the framework it has used to justify Lai’s imprisonment all along.

Then, asked about Lai himself, Trump offered this assessment: “He caused a lot of bedlam… he caused lots of turmoil for China. He tried to do the right thing, he wasn’t successful.”

The vocabulary was Beijing’s. Those phrases — bedlam, turmoil for China — are the Chinese Communist Party’s case against Lai, recited by an American president three days before he flies to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping.

Eighteen months ago, the same president sat for a Hugh Hewitt radio interview and made the opposite promise. Asked whether he would lean on Xi to free Lai if returned to office, Trump answered without hesitation: “100%, yes. I’ll get him out. He’ll be easy to get out.”

He has not gotten him out. Here’s the background.

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Dear friends,

Letters from Leo is publishing a series of scripture reflections through the Easter season, drawing on the teachings of Pope Leo XIV and the daily readings of the Church.

These reflections are “quieter” than my usual essays. They are prayers as much as arguments — meditations on what the lectionary asks of us in the weeks between Easter and Pentecost. The aim is the same as everything else I do here: to make the Gospel inescapable in ordinary life.

If this is the kind of writing you want in your inbox, please subscribe. If you are already a subscriber, thank you. You are the reason this work exists.

Subscribe now

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

Today’s Readings

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” — John 14:15–17

Today’s Gospel sounds like a contract. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Most of us read that line the way we read a job description — a list of conditions for the affection of someone in charge. Love arrives in proportion to what we earn.

At the Regina Caeli this morning, Pope Leo XIV said this is the wrong way to hear it. “God’s love is the basis for our righteousness,” he told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square. The commandments do not buy God’s love. They are what becomes of a life that knows itself already loved.

I needed to hear that today. I too often operate as if the love of God is something I have to top up — like a parking meter that runs out if I miss my prayers, lose my temper with those I love, or snap at someone on a deadline. I keep waking up trying to earn what has already been given.

Pope Leo called this a misconception. The honest word is amnesia. We have forgotten that the love came first.

Watch what the first reading is doing.

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On Sunday, May 11, 2025, an estimated 100,000 pilgrims packed St. Peter’s Square. Pope Leo XIV, three days into his pontificate, stepped onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica for his first public Regina Caeli — the Marian prayer Catholics offer in place of the Angelus during the Easter season.

He was supposed to recite it.

Instead, he sang.

The first U.S-born pope began intoning the ancient Marian hymn in a clear, confident Latin, his voice carrying out over Bernini’s colonnade.

The crowd erupted in applause. America’s first pope had given his first sung blessing on Good Shepherd Sunday, on the World Day of Prayer for Vocations — and, by the calendar of half a dozen countries including Italy and the United States, on Mother’s Day.

About that last detail.

The Voice on the Loggia Was Hers

The voice belonged, by inheritance, to Mildred Agnes Martínez Prevost, born December 30, 1911, in Chicago and baptized two months later at Holy Name Cathedral.

By the time her youngest son Robert arrived in 1955, Mildred had been singing in the choir at St. Mary of the Assumption parish for years. She was a contralto. Chicago Tribune archives place her as a soloist in a 1940 Mundelein College performance and as a competitor in the 1941 Chicagoland Music Festival.

Her son inherited the instrument and the discipline.

When Pope Leo XIV broke into the Regina Caeli on the loggia last May, what the world heard was an ancient Latin hymn rendered in the unmistakable phrasing of a Catholic boy whose mother took church music seriously. The voice over St. Peter’s Square — the one that drew gasps from a crowd of 100,000 — was hers.

I wrote the full biographical portrait of Mildred for the Letters from Leo Life & Formation series last October.

This Mother’s Day, with the country Mildred helped build under sustained assault, the story bears retelling — this time to a much wider audience.

This is the American story of a woman from Black Creole Louisiana whose son ascended to the Seat of Peter.

The Black Creole Family from the Seventh Ward

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Donald Trump’s approval rating among American Catholics has collapsed to thirty-eight percent — the lowest of his political career and a ten-point drop in less than two years, according to a new Washington Post survey.

That is the gap Trump’s media surrogates are racing to close. Their strategy is not to defend the president’s policies on Iran or immigration. They have decided instead to delegitimize Pope Leo XIV’s authority to speak on those issues at all.

Today, Pastor Robert Jeffress — the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas and one of Trump’s longest-serving evangelical advisers — went on Fox News and said it out loud.

“It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the pope has,” Jeffress told the network, reacting to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s audience with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Thursday.

This is the same pastor who has previously called the Catholic Church a “counterfeit” religion and promoted theories suggesting Satan founded Catholicism. Trump has called him “a wonderful man” and personally promoted his books from the Oval Office.

In the same Fox News segment, Jeffress reiterated his long-standing claim that Romans 13 — the Pauline passage on government authority — gives Trump “moral authority to use whatever force necessary, including assassination or even war” against foreign leaders he deems “evil.”

He made the identical claim in 2017 about Kim Jong Un, and he has now extended it to justify the ongoing American war in Iran. Pope Leo XIV, Jeffress said, “is sincerely wrong” about that war.

Here is where the pattern matters. This is not the first time in recent weeks that a major MAGA media figure has used a national pulpit to instruct the leader of the world’s largest organized religion on Scripture.

Three weeks ago, Sean Hannity used his Fox News program to lecture Pope Leo XIV on the Bible, invoking his Long Island Catholic-school upbringing and a year as a seminary dropout as credentials before citing “over 400 references to war” in Scripture as theological cover for the Iran campaign. Hannity framed his segment as a direct “message to the Vatican.”

The American hierarchy — Cupich, Tobin, McElroy, Broglio, and Cardinal Parolin in Rome — closed ranks around Pope Leo XIV across every ideological divide. Three weeks later, Jeffress is reading from the same script.

The pattern is deliberate. A Fox host questions the pope’s biblical knowledge. Days later, a White House pastor declares the president the better theologian. The president himself then amplifies the assault from Truth Social, calling Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics.”

Jeffress’s argument collapses on its own terms. Romans 13 does not authorize the assassination of foreign heads of state.

Here’s the full background.

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