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On Saturday evening, a post on X stopped me mid-scroll. Its language was incendiary, but the observation underneath it was striking: fifteen years ago, the Catholic Church was known around the world for the systematic sexual abuse of children and its cover-up, and today much of the world sees it as humanity’s moral conscience.

Set the language aside and the post is directionally correct, so I quote-tweeted it with a selfie of Pope Francis beside the man who would succeed him, Robert Prevost. More than 185,000 people have seen it since.

So let me say it plainly, on a Sunday night in October: the Catholic Church is back.

Fifteen years ago, I would not have believed that sentence. The abuse revelations that broke open in Boston in 2002 were the prologue to my young adulthood, and what wounded me most was how the Church’s leaders handled them. In 2009 the Murphy Report showed how the Archdiocese of Dublin had protected abusers for decades.

Then, on Easter Sunday 2010, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals, stood in St. Peter’s Square and assured Pope Benedict XVI that the faithful would not be swayed by “the petty gossip of the moment.” It was one of the lowest moments of my faith life.

That spring I was a college student abroad, living mostly in Rome, with stretches in Paris and Spain. I have rarely felt the loneliness of my faith the way I did in those months, when the Church looked to me like an institution whose days had passed it by.

The feeling followed me home. After I graduated from Xavier University, I moved to Washington in 2011, and being a young Catholic (a young Catholic Democrat, no less) in that city was a solitary experience.

What happened over the next fifteen years has felt like a resurrection, and Catholics know something about those. Getting to witness it, and even to play a small part in it, has been one of the great joys of my life. I see three causes behind it, and most people forget the first one.

Benedict the Meek

Benedict XVI was the pope of my coming of age. He was elected the spring I turned 16, and he left the Chair of Peter a few weeks before I turned 24. I did not agree with every decision he made, but I defended him, and I meant it.

In February 2013, in one of my first op-eds, I wrote for The Washington Post that young people could listen to this quiet man and believe him. A saying went around Rome in those years: young people came to St. Peter’s Square to see John Paul, but they came to listen to Benedict.

I was one of the listeners. His first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, taught me that being a Christian begins with “the encounter with an event, a person,” and I have carried that line with me ever since.

His greatest lesson came when he walked away. On Feb. 11, 2013, he announced he would become the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign, and I still believe it may be the humblest act any pope has ever performed.

A year later, with Francis freshly named Time’s Person of the Year, I wrote in that magazine that anyone who thanked God for the Francis Revolution owed thanks to “its soft-spoken founder: Benedict the Meek.” His choice to let go set everything after it in motion.

A papacy with the windows open

Francis took the papacy and made it human. He turned down the papal apartments for a room in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse, and on Aug. 28, 2013, he posed with teenagers from the Diocese of Piacenza inside St. Peter’s Basilica for the first selfie in papal history.

Asked about gay priests on the flight home from Rio in July 2013, he answered, “Who am I to judge?” He spoke off the cuff in morning homilies and airplane press conferences, and he stripped away the trappings of the office until it resembled the world we actually live in.

For the first time in my adult life, people outside the Church wanted to hear what a pope had to say.

The friar from Chiclayo

The second gift Francis gave us was his eye for an Augustinian friar from the South Side of Chicago.

In November 2014, he sent Robert Prevost to run the Diocese of Chiclayo in northern Peru, and he named him its bishop the following September. (I have written about how Peru made Pope Leo, and those years shaped everything.)

In January 2023, Francis brought him to Rome as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, the office that helps the pope choose bishops for much of the world.

That job gave Prevost a working knowledge of the global episcopate few churchmen have. Francis made him a cardinal that September.

In one of the final acts of his pontificate, on Feb. 6, 2025, Francis elevated Prevost to the order of cardinal bishops, the highest of the three ranks in the College of Cardinals. Its members hold the ancient sees around Rome (Prevost received Albano), and the dean of the college is chosen from among them. Eight days later, Francis entered Gemelli Hospital.

The cardinals elected Prevost pope on May 8, and Catholics give the Holy Spirit the credit. Francis, for his part, had made sure the electors knew his name. You can read the full story of the friendship between Leo and Francis in our archive.

The leader of the free world

Seventeen months into his pontificate, Leo has made the Catholic Church the moral voice the world turns to on artificial intelligence. His encyclical Magnifica Humanitas came out in May. At UNESCO in Paris on Sept. 25, he warned that “while ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons.”

Three days later, on the papal plane home from Metz, he answered Nvidia’s Jensen Huang over AI regulation on the same day he read Huang’s claims about guardrails.

Pope Leo XIV answers a question about artificial intelligence and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang aboard the papal plane home from Metz on Sept. 28, 2026.

On Friday, he told artists at the Vatican there is “an ontological difference” between their work and what a machine can generate. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity,” he wrote on X that morning, and the post has since drawn more than 24 million views, making it, as I noted earlier today, the most viewed papal tweet of all time. Leo went viral this week for defending humanity against the excesses of Silicon Valley, and the response shows how hungry people are for someone willing to do it.

Back in Paris on Sept. 26, 800,000 people filled the Champs-Élysées to see him. As I wrote last week, Pope Leo XIV is the leader of the free world, a job Washington has left vacant, and nothing in the days since has changed my mind.

The moment from France I keep returning to happened at Lourdes. Sixteen years after Sodano waved the scandal away as gossip, the first American pope met privately with survivors of clerical abuse, and that same weekend he urged France’s bishops to “acknowledge failings.” A Church that has come back looks like that.

Semper reformanda

We should not be triumphalist about any of this. The Church is a blessed institution, and it is also full of sinners, beginning with the one writing to you. Francis spent twelve years reminding us that we are seekers of the Lord, and Leo has taken up the same call in his own quiet voice.

Something else has become clear to me over these fifteen years. The fruit of the Second Vatican Council is starting to come to bear. No one could have imagined the Church of the 1950s having the reach the Church of the 2020s has, with an American pope the whole world stops to hear on war and on the machines we are building.

Scholars often say it takes a century to understand what an ecumenical council has done. Vatican II closed in 1965, so we are only now starting to understand it.

Fulton Sheen saw this coming. On Firing Line in January 1970, he defended Vatican II to William F. Buckley Jr. as the first truly global council in the Church’s history. Not one bishop from Asia or Africa sat at the First Vatican Council in 1870, Sheen told him, while at the Second, “61 percent of the bishops were from Americas, Asia, and Africa.” When Buckley asked why the pews weren’t filling, Sheen answered, “It’s going to take a long time for the yeast to work through the dough.”

We can rejoice that the yeast is finally working. A great deal has changed since that Easter in 2010, and the change is not finished. The old phrase Ecclesia semper reformanda, the Church always in need of reform, is the best description of us I know, and I pray we keep living up to it in the years to come.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, and with every Catholic and every person of goodwill who has watched this Church climb out of its darkest years and still believes it has something to give the world.

That climb was never ours to boast about. It began when an old German theologian chose to step aside. Francis threw the doors open after him, and now a friar from Chicago, schooled by the poor of northern Peru, carries the work forward. Our part is to keep walking with them, honest about our sins and unafraid to hope.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that tells the truth about itself and shows up for human dignity. They see that Church in Leo, and they want to belong to it.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing together for a Church that is always reforming and a world that stays human, I am asking you to join us.

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Dear friends,

Francis of Assisi died eight hundred years ago, lying on the bare ground of a chapel not much bigger than a two-car garage.

Today’s readings (a vineyard whose tenants try to steal and Paul’s plea from a prison cell to think about “whatever is lovely”) suit him so well that I couldn’t write about anything else.

We’ll also go back to the evening in 2013 when a Brazilian cardinal hugged a newly elected pope and handed him his name.

These Scripture reflections are available exclusively to paid subscribers. If my work means something to you, I’m asking for your help.

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Today’s Readings

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes.” — Matthew 21:42

Francis of Assisi died sometime after dark on October 3, 1226, on the floor of the Porziuncola, the tiny chapel down in the valley below Assisi where the whole movement had started.

He had asked the brothers to take off his habit and lay him on the bare ground. (Thomas of Celano, who wrote the first life of Francis a couple of years later, says he was praying Psalm 142 near the end and wanted the friars to sing his Canticle of the Creatures, the one with the late verse welcoming “Sister Death.”) He was forty-four.

So last night made it eight hundred years.

The friars in Assisi asked churches everywhere to ring their bells at 11:59, and I’d like to more than a few parishes obliged. His feast got bumped this year because October 4 fell on a Sunday, so most of us heard the readings for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time this morning.

Read them with Francis in mind, though, and they sound a lot like his biography.

It’s the third week in a row that Jesus has put us in a vineyard.

Two weeks ago it was the day laborers hired at five o’clock, and last week the son who said no and went anyway.

This week Matthew gives us a landowner who leases the place out and leaves town, along with tenants who beat and kill the servants he sends back for his share of the grapes. Finally he sends his son. “This is the heir,” the tenants say. “Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance” (Matthew 21:38).

They already had the grapes, of course. What they were after was the deed to the land.

Francis knew a thing or two about inheritances. He was baptized Giovanni, but his father, Pietro di Bernardone, a cloth merchant who did a lot of business in France, called him Francesco, and everyone assumed the boy would take over the shop.

Around 1206 Francis sold off a load of his father’s cloth (and the horse that carried it) to pay for repairs at the half-ruined church of San Damiano, and Pietro dragged him in front of Bishop Guido to get the money back.

Francis returned the money. Then he handed back the clothes he was wearing, too, piling them at his father’s feet in front of a crowd, and said that from then on he would say only “Our Father who art in heaven.”

The bishop threw his own cloak over him.

Pope Francis made a point of going to that same room in the bishop’s residence on his first October 4 as pope, in 2013, and he told the poor who had gathered there that the Church had some stripping of its own to do. “Spiritual worldliness kills!” he said.

He had already explained the name, seven months earlier, to a hall full of reporters.

During the conclave, he was sitting next to his old friend Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of Brazil, the retired archbishop of São Paulo, and when the count passed two-thirds, Hummes gave him a hug and a kiss and said, “Don’t forget the poor!”

Francis told the journalists on March 16, 2013, what went through his head: “And those words came to me: the poor, the poor. Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched this clip in the past thirteen years.

In that same audience he let a wish slip out (“How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!”), and he called the saint “the man who loves and protects creation.”

Read more

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Updated Oct. 4, 2026, to include Eliano Younes’s response to John McCarthy.

On Friday night, Eliano Younes, Palantir’s head of strategic engagement, answered Pope Leo XIV’s warning about AI-generated art by photoshopping the pope into Palantir merchandise: a maroon hoodie stamped with the word “ontology.” Palantir sells that hoodie in its online store, and Younes has promoted the company’s merch drops on X. The image dresses the Vicar of Christ in a defense contractor’s gear to mock him.

His caption read: “did someone say… ontological?”

John McCarthy, who served in the Biden White House as senior adviser for political engagement and led the president’s Catholic outreach, called it out on Saturday morning. “I don’t think putting a corporate logo on the Pope, even as a joke, is particularly appropriate,” he wrote, adding that the Church’s voice on AI “should be celebrated not mocked.”

Younes answered McCarthy a few hours later. “John, I’m a proud Catholic and fan of Pope Leo,” he wrote. “The Catholic Church is an important institution and I know that many people look to them for guidance on major developments such as AI. I’m just very excited that he used the word ‘ontological.’”

Younes, in the end, stood up for the pope. Others in Silicon Valley have not.

On Sept. 24, Leo told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that artificial intelligence “can be used for surveillance, manipulation, and discrimination.”

That same day in Berlin, Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder and chairman, called Leo a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party.

Eight days later, Younes dressed the pope in company merch. In leaked recordings of a private lecture series last year, Thiel named Leo as a potential manifestation of the Antichrist.

Not everyone at Palantir is laughing. Bill Rivers, a Catholic and Pentagon veteran who now works at the company (we met years ago in Washington), had kinder words for Leo on Saturday. The pope “held the line,” Rivers wrote. “AI agents are not persons. They don’t have souls.”

Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a practicing Catholic who has written about her Jesuit upbringing, sided with the Church on Thursday. Responding to Anthropic’s lobbying, she quoted Blaise Pascal on people “who having renounced all the laws of God and Nature themselves make laws which they rigorously obey.”

That took some guts. Her boss, Marc Andreessen, mocked Leo’s call for moral AI last November before backtracking under pressure.

A word about this piece. Nobody can offer a conclusive account of how Silicon Valley reacted to one week of news, and I have no instrument for measuring it. I’ve gathered these reactions so that we, as a community, can get a sense of where things stand and where we’re going.

A week that started with the Times

On Tuesday, Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of the May launch of Magnifica Humanitas because the encyclical rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. His team then lobbied the pope’s advisers.

On Friday, Leo met artists and curators in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace and told them that “algorithms lack the spark of the human.” His X account posted the heart of the address that morning.

The competition weighs in

Sam Altman of OpenAI posted on Saturday morning that he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” calling it “a real safety issue.”

A day earlier, Google DeepMind research scientist Jon Barron quoted my post on the Times story. “Kudos to Pope Leo,” he wrote. “I am disturbed by how some of my fellow AI researchers keep trying to elevate the moral standing of checkpoints and harnesses.”

Let me be blunt: we should be skeptical. OpenAI and Google sell products that compete head-to-head with Anthropic’s Claude, and both companies have plenty of commercial reasons to enjoy watching a rival take a beating in the press. When a business agrees with the pope, its motives still deserve a look.

From Ted Cruz to Indivisible

What struck me most was who else showed up. Sen. Ted Cruz quoted the pope on Friday night: “Amen. Machines have no soul.”

On the left, Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible (the group behind the No Kings protests), skewered the premise in a quote of the same post. “If you believe that Claude is a sentient being with a soul,” she asked, “why are you enslaving it and forcing it to answer all of my stupid questions.”

The fight over a word

Not everyone sided with the pope. Paul Graham, the Y Combinator co-founder, replied to Leo on Friday morning: “Since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you’ll say when AIs are trained on visual experience as well as art made by human artists, because that is presumably coming.” I answered that Graham misunderstands ontology.

Others turned to ridicule. Aran Nayebi, a machine-learning professor at Carnegie Mellon, answered the pope on Friday morning with an AI-generated cartoon of a pontiff at a lectern, pointing to a biological neural network and declaring that only it has “THE SPARK.” His caption read, “Trying to locate the spark.”

George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok shared the cartoon on Saturday morning. “Religious leaders have no special insight into AI consciousness,” he wrote, “or human consciousness for that matter.” For a Church that has spent two thousand years thinking about the human soul, that is quite a dismissal.

“Ontology” has become the word of this fight, so it’s worth saying what Catholics mean by it. Ontology is the study of being itself, the essence of a thing apart from how it looks or what it does. When a man is ordained, the Church teaches that he undergoes an ontological change; he becomes a priest in his very being. The Eucharist involves a change at that same depth, where bread becomes the Body of Christ while its appearance stays the same.

So when Leo speaks of an “ontological difference” between art and machine output, he means the gap lies in what each thing is, before anyone asks how good it looks. A painting comes from a person who intends it. Graham’s reply concerns how convincing the images will become, which is a fair point about quality and beside the one Leo was making. The irony is thick. Palantir borrowed the word for software that maps a customer’s data, then printed it on a hoodie it sells, and Younes seemed to think the pope had wandered onto company turf.

Silicon Valley needs to touch grass

Too many people in Silicon Valley cannot touch grass. They have lost the gestalt of the American people, the sense of who we are and what we feel, and that chasm is causing them real turmoil right now.

Pope Francis preached a culture of encounter, and in Evangelii Gaudium he wrote that “realities are more important than ideas.” The people building these products need to encounter the people whose lives those products are reshaping.

One more note. I’ve received texts suggesting that the Times story left out critical details about how the exchange between Olah and the Vatican began. Everyone texting me is acting in good faith and knows this world well. Still, we stand with the article, and we believe it is correct. I trust the New York Times and Elizabeth Dias, and I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for any updates. For now, the story looks solid.

Despite all the criticism of him this week, Olah deserves some credit as well. He told the Times he is “genuinely uncertain” whether AI models are conscious and that “the thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.” Lord knows we will keep talking about it here at Letters from Leo.

This roundup paints in broad strokes, and more will come in the days ahead. The most important thing is already clear. Under Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church is a main character in this debate, as it ought to be.

Leo took his name because Leo XIII answered the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum, and two days after his election he told the cardinals that the Church must now answer artificial intelligence. He is living up to that name. Leo XIII would recognize the work, and so would Francis, the friend who made Robert Prevost a bishop and later brought him to Rome. We’re proud of him too.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics, along with countless others of goodwill, who believe a painting carries the spark of the person who made it and that no company’s software gets to redefine what it means to be human.

Silicon Valley is selling a future in which our deepest questions get answered by whoever owns the servers. We remain rooted in a faith that has spent two thousand years insisting every person is made in the image of God, and we refuse to hand that truth to a billionaire’s brand team.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a voice that speaks plainly about human dignity while the most powerful men on earth mock a pope for defending it.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the idolatry of the machine, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

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Pope Leo XIV received a gathering of artists and curators in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace on Friday morning and asked them to help the Church hold a line that Silicon Valley would very much like erased.

A few hours later, the pope’s @Pontifex account posted a passage lifted straight from the address:

By Friday afternoon the post had passed 6.4 million views on X, with more than 180,000 likes and 36,000 reposts. (The pope’s monthly prayer intention, posted the day before on the worthy subject of mental health ministry, had drawn about 437,000.)

The full address is sharper than the tweet. Leo warned the artists that search engines “merely return what already exists and tend to give us what we already want,” and he named the risk that follows: “the great danger is not only censorship but also homogenization.”

Art, in his telling, forces us to stop before “that which cannot be consumed.”

The Times story catches fire

Friday’s address landed at the end of a week that began with a story about the same fight. On Tuesday, Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, after reviewing Magnifica Humanitas in advance, proposed that his company pull out of the encyclical’s May 25 launch at the Vatican. His objection was that the document denies machines are conscious.

Anthropic then lobbied the pope’s advisers to reconsider. Dias found that the company had spent the better part of a year courting religious scholars in private meetings, many held under nondisclosure agreements, meant to raise the possibility that its Claude models “might be conscious or have moral status.”

For a few days the story stayed mostly inside the world of people who follow AI and the Vatican closely. On Thursday and Friday, it broke out. The post I wrote about it Friday morning has now passed 3 million views on X.

I think I know why it took a few days to catch. The Times built its story around the consciousness question, with academics and theologians weighing whether Claude might have moral standing. That debate is worth having, yet it buried the bigger news: a leading AI company lobbied the Vatican this aggressively to change what the Church teaches about the human person.

Once readers saw that, the obvious question followed close behind. Why would a software company need the pope’s blessing?

The answer is simple enough. Silicon Valley wants moral cover, and the Catholic Church, with 1.4 billion members, is the moral authority it most wants to borrow.

Where the public stands

Put Tuesday’s story beside Friday’s tweet and the public verdict is easy to read. One of the best-funded companies in Silicon Valley leaned on the Church to soften its teaching on the human person, and the Church declined. Days after the news emerged, the pope told a room of artists that algorithms lack the spark of humanity, and the post reached millions of people within hours.

The reaction has been building for months. Charlie Camosy tallied it in Religion News Service on Tuesday: Bill Gates wrote that the encyclical “lays a strong foundation for the work that needs to be done,” and Notre Dame has committed more than $50 million to putting it into practice.

Tyler Austin Harper, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained why on Friday. Quoting the pope’s post, Harper wrote that “religious—particularly catholic—critics are speaking to the public’s moral disquiet in a way that secular thinkers, reliant on utilitarian claims about harm, are not.”

In the thread that followed, Harper argued that secular critics are mostly left making their case on “empirical harm, water consumed, labor exploited,” which matters but “leaves unaddressed the almost species-level disquiet many feel.”

His conclusion was blunt. AI, he wrote, “has exposed the spiritual, moral, and perhaps even metaphysical thinness of much secular thought.”

Harper is right. The data centers do consume enormous amounts of water, and the models were trained on the work of writers and artists, much of it uncompensated. A ledger of those harms still cannot answer the question millions of people are now asking, which is whether a human being remains worth anything once a machine can imitate her.

Leo answers it in the oldest language the West has. On Friday he reminded the artists of what he had said at Lourdes on Sunday, that the human person is “‘worthy’ simply by virtue of existing and of being destined for eternity.” A statistical model cannot say that sentence and mean it.

The leader of the free world

This is why I wrote this week that Pope Leo XIV is the leader of the free world. Last Saturday he drew 800,000 people to the Champs-Élysées, and the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker called him “the one man in the world most of us can look up to.”

On Friday I put it plainly on X:

The tech oligarchs have the money and the servers. Peter Thiel has now attacked the pope three times, most recently calling him “a useful idiot for the Chinese Communists.” What Leo holds is the trust of ordinary people who can feel their own humanity being priced and sold back to them.

Populism has earned a bad name in American life, since it has mostly meant demagogues stoking resentment for their own gain. Leo practices a different kind. He stands with the many against a powerful few by reminding the many what they are worth in the eyes of God.

In this fight the pope has become the defender of humanity itself, our promoter and our protector, and the reaction this week shows that the public knows it. The only question left is whether the rest of us will stand beside him.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who believe a human being is more than a dataset, and that no company gets to decide who counts as a person.

The billionaires building these machines have spent years telling us that their products will save us. Pope Leo keeps returning to an older claim, that we were already saved, at a far higher price, by a God who took on flesh.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a moral voice that cannot be bought by Silicon Valley.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of the human person against those who would reduce it to code, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, along with every installment of Pope Leo Takes On AI and our Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah saw an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical days before its May 25 launch and proposed pulling out of the event because of what it said about AI consciousness. Two participants told the Times that Olah and his team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the possibility of machine consciousness seriously.

Elizabeth Dias, the paper’s national religion correspondent, published the story on Tuesday. It is extraordinary in scope and in length, and it is wonderfully done. Dias has covered faith and power for well over a decade, and it shows in every paragraph.

Her piece is built around a campaign Anthropic has run since last fall, a series of private meetings and calls with religious scholars (many of them under nondisclosure agreements) meant to raise the possibility that its Claude models “might be conscious or have moral status.” Olah, who leads the company’s interpretability research, sits at the center of it.

The courtship came with hospitality. One April evening, according to the Times, an Anthropic executive took a group of religious thinkers to dinner at an upscale tasting-menu restaurant in San Francisco. Participants went home with a handwritten thank-you note, a coffee mug and an orange-bound copy of Claude’s constitution.

The theologian David Decosimo, who teaches ethics and religion at the University of North Carolina, put it bluntly on X this week: Anthropic courted religious leaders under nondisclosure agreements “all while wining & dining them to the max.”

Many of the scholars and theologians in these rooms are working class, at least by Silicon Valley standards. Luxury hotels and tasting-menu dinners can be intoxicating.

The price of admission is steep, though, because they are being asked to set aside their own moral traditions for Anthropic’s vision of the world.

The ask

The lobbying is the real news, and it could have been the Times’s lede. Olah grew up evangelical and has since left Christianity, the Times reports, so he did not come to Rome steeped in how the Church teaches. Even so, the episode is remarkable.

An encyclical is among the highest forms of papal teaching. Catholics receive it from the man they believe to be the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and no frontier lab or billionaire gets to edit its doctrine.

Leo did not move. Paragraph 99 of Magnifica Humanitas says that so-called artificial intelligences “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain.” Nor, the pope writes, “do they have a moral conscience.”

I do not think Olah is a bad man. He has acted in good faith, and I have credited him for engaging the Church while much of his industry sneered at the encyclical. But the ask shows how little Silicon Valley understands the Church, or religion at all.

Last fall I wrote that the industry’s original sin is a refusal to recognize any authority greater than itself, a temptation as old as Genesis: to be like God. Ten months later, that temptation is alive inside one of the more thoughtful labs in the business.

In professional settings, I have spoken with the people who work in the religious outreach efforts at the frontier labs (some call them philosophy teams, others describe their work as the philosophical underpinnings of the models), and at times I have come away unimpressed.

Few of them know Catholicism well. In one crude example, a man I met in person at a coffee shop (not a Michelin star restaurant!) who was a key contact for the Catholic community did not know what an encyclical was. He could not pronounce the word, and he kept calling the pope Leo XII.

There is a lot of work to do here.

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Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike on Wednesday night, and it failed. Inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, prison staff pushed two doses of pentobarbital into her body. According to Kim Chandler, the Associated Press reporter who witnessed it, Pike looked toward prison officials and asked if it was supposed to feel that way.

When the media witnesses were led out at about 8:53 p.m., Pike could still be heard snoring, “clearly very alive.” An ambulance took her to a hospital, and her attorney says she is alive and receiving medical care.

The botched execution came one year to the day after Pope Leo XIV stood outside Castel Gandolfo on Sept. 30, 2025, and answered a question from an EWTN reporter. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” the pope said.

None of this takes away from what Pike did. In January 1995, when she was 18, she and two other students at the Job Corps center in Knoxville took 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate, to a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus and tortured her to death. Slemmer’s family has carried that loss for 31 years, and they deserve our prayers today. Church teaching leaves room for both grief and justice.

It also asks whether Tennessee must kill again in Colleen’s name.

A governor who prays in public

Gov. Bill Lee had the power to say no. He is an evangelical Christian in the eighth and final year of his governorship, and he has put his faith at the center of it. On Sept. 1, Lee proclaimed Sept. 18 a statewide day of prayer and fasting, asking Tennesseans to “humble ourselves before the Lord.”

On Sept. 10, Tennessee’s three Catholic bishops (J. Mark Spalding of Nashville, David Talley of Memphis and Mark Beckman of Knoxville) wrote to Lee: “We respectfully ask that you halt the execution of Ms. Pike.” On Sept. 28 the governor denied clemency and said he did “not plan to intervene.”

“I certainly don’t turn off my spiritual or moral compass in making a decision like that,” Lee told Crux in 2019, when asked how his faith shapes his choices on executions. A woman who killed at 18 has spent 31 years in a cell, nearly all of them as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, and a governor who leads his state in fasting still wanted her dead.

That is a desecration of the faith he professes.

After the injections failed, Lee ordered a third-party review and halted the remaining execution scheduled for this year. Tennesseans, he said, expect executions to be carried out in a way that is “effective.”

What I saw in Bledsoe County

As a native Tennessean, I have found this horrific to watch. It is also, sadly, familiar. When I ran for Congress in 2020, the coronavirus tore through the Bledsoe County Correctional Complex in my district and infected about a quarter of the men held there, and I saw up close how the Tennessee Department of Correction treats the people in its care and the officers who guard them.

I tried to make it a national issue. Records I obtained through a public records request showed that the department did not begin testing its staff systematically until April 10, Good Friday. The Washington Post reported on all of it in May 2020, telling the story of an officer’s wife and an inmate’s girlfriend whom I had brought together on a Facebook Live broadcast. “These communities, ordinarily opposed, are now participating in the same struggle,” I told the paper.

The department has not earned more trust since. In 2022, Lee stopped the execution of Oscar Smith about an hour before it was set to begin because the drugs had never been tested for endotoxins, and an independent review later found years of skipped testing.

The MAGA reaction

Michael Knowles, the Daily Wire host and a Catholic, wrote on X this morning: “Have the state executioners considered taking Christa Pike to the woods and crushing her skull with a rock?” A year ago, Knowles was attacking the Church’s teaching on the death penalty. In March, he delivered the keynote address at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.

JD Flynn, editor of The Pillar, posted Knowles’s words beside EWTN’s coverage of that breakfast. In the replies, he asked whether a person who talks that way should be “feted as an exemplary Catholic.” Flynn and I don’t always agree, but I admire him for telling the truth here, and he has been consistent about it: he is, he wrote, “opposed both to abortion and calls to crush the skulls of people with rocks.” Plenty of MAGA replies cheered Knowles on instead, including one that called his post “the most based thing I’ve ever seen Michael Knowles tweet.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee to succeed Lee, wrote that “the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair.” Last year’s reaction to the pope ran along the same lines. Knowles’s Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh called it a “really terrible answer from Pope Leo.”

What the Church teaches

Leo did not invent this teaching. Pope John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae in 1995 that the cases where execution is truly necessary “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” Four years later, standing in St. Louis, he called the death penalty “both cruel and unnecessary.”

Pope Francis finished the work in 2018, revising the Catechism to say that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Leo has carried it forward. In April, he sent a video message to Illinois marking 15 years since the state abolished capital punishment: “In this regard, we affirm that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.” (As Robert Prevost, he had thanked Gov. Pat Quinn for signing that abolition in 2011.)

I keep thinking about Sister Helen Prejean, who has spent more than four decades sitting with condemned men and women and telling the country what happens in its death chambers. Ohio offers a lesson too. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Catholic Republican, has kept his state’s executions on hold with one reprieve after another, most recently on Aug. 7, and in June he called on the legislature to abolish the death penalty outright.

One of the lawmakers leading that fight is state Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Republican who once represented southern Ohio in Congress. “I hold my pro-life beliefs firmly, and I support the full repeal of the death penalty,” she said in June.

My one hope after Wednesday night is that Tennessee, and the country, will finally start to reconsider a system in which the state can fail to kill a woman strapped to a gurney and answer with a promise to do the job better next time. Christa Pike is still alive this afternoon, and the challenge Pope Leo issued a year ago is waiting for Bill Lee and for every Catholic who cheered Knowles this morning.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, with Tennessee’s bishops and with every Catholic who believes that the dignity of a human person survives even the worst thing she has ever done.

Colleen Slemmer’s life mattered. The Church insists that Christa Pike’s life carries the same dignity, even after what she did, and a state that pushes two doses of poison into a prisoner and then calls the failure an administrative matter for review has lost sight of both women. The Gospel will not let us look away.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that is pro-life from the womb to the death chamber, and for a Church with the courage to say so out loud.

If you believe this movement matters (Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a politics of cruelty), I am asking you to join us.

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Dear friends,

I want to tell you about a street corner in Louisville.

On March 18, 1958, a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton left the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, outside Bardstown, Kentucky, to run errands in the city. He was standing at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the middle of the shopping district, when something broke open in him.

Watching ordinary people hurry past, Merton was overwhelmed by the realization that he loved every one of them. He later wrote that there was no way to tell people they were all walking around “shining like the sun.” (A state historical marker stands on that corner today.)

I first heard that story as a teenager in Tennessee. Southern Catholicism is a strange and wonderful thing, a minority faith in Evangelical country, and the priests and nuns who reared me read Flannery O’Connor and Merton the way other people read the sports page. One of those priests, Father Mark Beckman, put Merton in my hands. Pope Francis made him the bishop of Knoxville in 2024, and I still owe him for the gift.

Merton taught me that faith and action can’t be pulled apart. The same monk who spent his days in silent prayer wrote against nuclear war and segregation from a hermitage in the Kentucky hills, and Wendell Berry, the farmer-poet we lost this month, was among the friends who climbed the hill to see him.

He had company. Catholics in the twentieth-century South were often pioneers for justice, and they paid for it. Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh desegregated his parishes in 1953, a year before Brown v. Board of Education. In 1962, Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans excommunicated three segregationists, among them the political boss Leander Perez, for fighting the integration of Catholic schools.

When Pope Francis addressed Congress in September 2015, he held up four Americans as models: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day (whose cause moved closer to sainthood last month under Leo), and Merton, whom Francis praised as “a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.”

I tell you all this because, in my own small way, this community has given me a taste of what Merton felt at Fourth and Walnut. Late at night, reading your comments and emails, I see a crowd of people shining like the sun.

In dark times, you are a source of light. Together we are standing up to authoritarianism and fighting for the values of the Gospel in the United States, under the leadership of the first American pope.

I have spent my entire adult life in politics. I’ve worked campaigns for fifteen years, I ran for Congress in 2020, and I believe elections matter enormously. Still, politics is always downstream of something deeper.

What a people believes about the human person (its moral gestalt, if you like) settles most elections long before anyone counts a ballot.

That is why the coming months matter so much.

On Nov. 3, Americans will vote in the first nationwide election of Leo’s pontificate, and by the morning after, the 2028 presidential season will be in full swing. We are coming upon one of the most critical junctures in our nation’s history, with the future of our posterity at stake. This is a values debate, so deal us in.

I have a dogmatic belief that you and I are living through a providential moment. Just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, he has raised up a pope from America to help defeat global authoritarianism.

Look at what Leo did in France this week and tell me he isn’t the leader of the free world.

Imagine what a community like ours — hopeful, formed, and engaged — could do for a country starving for moral clarity.

None of that will happen automatically, and none of it can happen without you.

Letters from Leo is 100% reader-supported.

There’s no corporate backing or institutional sponsor, and no billionaire is waiting in the wings; it’s just you and this growing community, choosing to keep this work alive.

So if this project has brought value to your life or to someone you love, I’m humbly asking for your support. This work only moves forward when people who care about truth, conscience, and the common good decide it’s worth carrying.

The late Pope Francis called the Church to a revolution of tenderness.

Pope Leo XIV’s witness asks us to carry that revolution into American politics, culture, and media, offering a different way of being a nation in an age slipping toward cruelty and authoritarian reflex.

To help us build that future, here are three concrete ways you can support this mission:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts, including the biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, and help sustain this newsletter.

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If you can’t subscribe or donate, I ask those of you who pray to pray for us. Hold one another up as well, along with Pope Leo, who carries a heavy cross, and the nation that gave him to the world.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters, no matter your faith or your politics.

Merton walked back to Gethsemani after that afternoon in Louisville and kept writing for another decade, convinced the glory he saw on Fourth Street belonged to everyone.

I believe it belongs to this community too. Let us rise up, fellow travelers, and be on our way.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

PS — If you’d like to make a larger gift through a credit card, check, family foundation, or donor-advised fund, reply to this email or DM us. We’ll gladly help you invest in our mission.

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Pope Leo XIV flew home from Metz on Monday night after four days in France, a journey that drew 800,000 people to the Champs-Élysées and carried him from the Élysée Palace to the grotto at Lourdes.

The speeches will get the headlines. The more revealing material came in the margins, in offhand answers on the papal plane and a line in French caught on Emmanuel Macron’s camera.

Here are six things we learned about the man.

1. He reads the news as it breaks

Nvidia unveiled a new AI safety platform on Monday morning, and CEO Jensen Huang spent part of that morning on CNBC’s Squawk Box promoting it.

By that evening, Leo was standing in the aisle of the papal plane, microphone in hand, answering a question about artificial intelligence.

“It’s interesting to note that just today I read that the head of NVIDIA claims that he has found some way of inserting into AI certain guardrails,” Leo told reporters. Huang, he added, is “the same one, however, that says there should be no limits placed and no government regulation.”

Popes have always followed the news. Francis read about migrants drowning off Lampedusa in an Italian newspaper in the summer of 2013, and only weeks after reading the news, on July 8, he stood on the island and said the tragedy had “constantly come back to me like a painful thorn in my heart.”

What sets Leo apart is the way he takes it in. Rome runs six hours ahead of New York, so a pope (he turned 71 this month) rebutting a Silicon Valley product launch on the day it happened is reading on his iPhone between events. His news seems to reach him the way ours reaches us, through a fast, algorithmic feed.

We saw the same thing in April. On April 19, the parents of 168 children killed in the bombing of a school in Minab, Iran, published a letter to Leo that surfaced through Iranian state media and spread mostly on X. Four days later, on the flight home from Africa, Leo told reporters, “I have just seen a letter from families of children who were killed on the first day of the attack.”

My read is that Leo keeps his own window onto the internet, quite possibly an anonymous account he uses to follow the news. To be clear, the Vatican has never said so. Still, a pope who found a Press TV letter within days and an Nvidia launch within hours is getting his news from somewhere beyond the morning briefing.

Put it this way: Leo is tethered to reality day in and day out. He sees the world we see, on the same kind of screen and at the same speed, and he answers it in real time. If the Vatican ever releases his Sunday iPhone screen time report, I suspect the number will be high.

2. The European project is his family’s story

Popes have championed a united Europe since the rubble of 1945, and Leo cited Paul VI’s 1964 decision to name St. Benedict the continent’s patron. Pius XII backed a European federation as early as 1933, when he was still Cardinal Pacelli, and in 1957 he told the Congress of Europe that “the construction of the union is going forward.” His hope was that Europe’s middle-sized nations, none of them superpowers, could hold off tyranny together after fascism and Nazism had crushed them one at a time.

It seems to me that Leo sees something of that in today’s world, where great powers again treat smaller nations as pieces on a board.

During the trip, I told BBC News that many Catholics felt Francis, who understandably spent his energy on the peripheries, “did not do enough to lift up the rise of Catholicism that was happening in Europe.” That choice made sense, since Francis wanted to make sure the Church touched parts of the world it had long overlooked. Leo, I argued, wants to show there really is a vibrant church emerging there.

What I underestimated was how central the European project is to him, and the reason seems to be personal.

In a video Macron posted from Metz, the pope explains, in French, “My father was in Normandy during the Second World War. I grew up with the ideas of Liberation and unification.” Louis Prevost, a U.S. Navy veteran of D-Day, raised a son who now speaks about Europe with the conviction of an heir.

At the Robert Schuman Congress Center that afternoon, Leo called international law and multilateralism “the best antidote to the desire for domination” and asked young Europeans to make “a Europe reconciled, united and strong” their watchword. As I wrote this week, I think that makes him the leader of the free world.

3. He trusts the crowds over the charts

Ryan Burge, the political scientist whose charts have become gospel for anyone tracking American religion, has written that Catholic Mass attendance has dropped by half since 1972 and that the cause is “just generational replacement.” Leo reads the moment differently.

Days after his election, he shared an anecdote with NBC’s Lester Holt about people coming back to church because there was an American pope. France gave him more to point to. The French bishops counted about 13,200 adult baptisms and 8,200 teenage ones at Easter this year, a 20 percent jump from 2025, and 80,000 young people filled the Stade de France to pray with him.

Surveys take years to register what happens in a parish. Something has been stirring beneath the surface of European Catholicism for a while, and Leo went to France to say that he sees it. So do I.

4. His language skills keep getting better

Leo delivered most of his speeches in France in French, and it showed real work. Last fall, word spread that he had returned to Duolingo after a year away. On the flight to Paris, he told reporters he had been practicing his French but no longer uses the app.

Whatever his method, a man who sharpens a language in his seventies has a plastic mind. He already works in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese alongside his native English, and the Church is blessed to have a polyglot pope for a century when so much depends on being understood.

I’ve said before that Leo’s superpower is that he can speak native English and when he does, his words go viral. What I underestimated is how much his willingness to learn and perfect other languages means to people across the globe.

Leo worked hard to speak French well, and per social media reports on the ground, that meant a lot to the French pople.

5. Euthanasia stirs him the way the death penalty does

French lawmakers voted in July to legalize assisted dying. Leo warned against it at the Élysée on his first day, then returned to the subject with far more force at Lourdes. Meeting the sick at the Accueil Notre-Dame, he warned that “medicine must never become the servant of programmed death.”

“It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal,” he said. “What is legal is not necessarily moral.”

The passion has a long history. On March 9, 2011, the day Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed the state’s death penalty repeal, Robert Prevost, then prior general of the Augustinians, filled out the contact form on the governor’s website. “THANK YOU for your courageous decision,” he wrote. “You have my full support!”

A year ago this week, on Sept. 30, 2025, he told reporters at Castel Gandolfo that someone who opposes abortion but supports the death penalty “is not really pro-life,” and he said the same of the inhuman treatment of immigrants. After France, euthanasia belongs on that list.

The method stood out as much as the message. When Pope Francis called doctors who perform abortions “hitmen” on his flight home from Belgium in 2024, the Belgian government summoned the papal nuncio. Leo pressed France on euthanasia throughout the trip, yet Macron still stood beside him in Metz and posted their exchange to his own X account.

“When the Church speaks about defending life,” Leo said on the plane, “we’re not entering into politics, we’re applying the Gospel to people’s lives.”

6. He is willing to name the far right

The last surprise came at 30,000 feet. Ludwig Ring-Eifel of KNA, the German Catholic news agency, asked Leo about the Church’s decline in Germany and “the astonishing rise of extremist parties.” Earlier this month, the Alternative for Germany took nearly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt.

A cautious pope had easy exits. He could have blamed secularism, or taken a swipe at the Synodal Way, the German reform process that Rome has spent years reining in. Leo chose neither.

He said it would be worth studying “if and how there may be a relationship” involving “the growth of these groups on the far right,” then drew the line himself. The fusion of “these far-right points of view with a certain kind of religion,” he said, is “not an authentic expression of Christianity.”

Early in his pontificate, Leo weighed every political word like a diplomat. In France he took aim at a movement that dresses nationalism in the language of the faith, a movement with plenty of admirers in Washington.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who reads the same news we do and answers it with the Gospel. He defends the dying patient in a French hospital with the same conviction he once brought to the condemned on Illinois’s death row.

He refuses to let the faith become a costume for nationalism. In a season when powerful men borrow the name of Christ to sell cruelty, that refusal is a gift to every Catholic who wants the Church to be a home for human dignity.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth about power and still believes in the common good.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for every human life against the idols of nationalism, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get our series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, including the Dolton kitchen table where his father shaped him, along with our reporting on Pope Leo Takes On AI and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

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Pope Leo XIV rode down the Champs-Élysées on Saturday morning with the Arc de Triomphe at his back, and Paris came out to meet him.

The Vatican put the crowd at 800,000, roughly 200,000 more people than had registered for his Mass at the Place de la Concorde. The popemobile stopped again and again along the route so he could bless babies, children, and people with disabilities lifted up to him.

CNN’s Melissa Bell, reporting from the avenue, said the crowd ran “all the way up the Champs-Élysées towards the Etoile.” A Catholic Arena video of that morning spread across social media over the weekend, and one minute of it shows why.

The welcome had been building since Friday, when an estimated 300,000 people lined his route to Notre-Dame and some 80,000 young people filled the Stade de France that night to pray with him. No other American alive could draw crowds like that in a country as secular as France.

On Saturday evening, I posted the modern-day pieta of him holding a young girl with special needs on X with the caption: “The leader of the free world.” Nearly half a million people saw it, and it drew a lot of attention, both positive and negative. I stand by it, and I don’t mean it as a figure of speech.

The phrase has a history worth knowing. “Free world” entered wide use in 1940, after Hitler’s armies overran Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, as a name for the democracies still standing against him. Franklin Roosevelt used it in 1941 while asking Congress to arm them.

During the Cold War, Americans handed “leader of the free world” to their presidents, because Washington held the alliance together. The title always followed the work, though. In 2016, commentators gave it to Angela Merkel (who waved it away) once they doubted an American president would keep doing that job.

It was never a political word. It was moral in its dimensions.

Our government has since walked away from much of that work. The State Department announced in July 2025 that the United States would quit UNESCO, for the third time in the agency’s history, effective at the end of this year.

On Sept. 25, the American pope stood at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and defended the multilateral institutions his home country is leaving. No one appointed him to the vacancy, and he stepped into it anyway.

Leo knows what the free world cost. His father, Louis Marius Prevost, was a young Navy officer who served as executive officer of a tank landing ship and took part in the D-Day landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944.

That August, he joined the Allied landings in southern France, and I wrote in June about the quiet D-Day father who kept his son on the road to the priesthood.

As a young man, I first came to understand Normandy, and all its power, through Andy Rooney’s famous monologue at the end of 60 Minutes in 2004. His words still ring in my ears:

“If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach. See what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.”

In Metz on Monday, the son spoke about that inheritance himself. French President Emmanuel Macron posted the moment on X.

“My father was in Normandy during the Second World War,” Leo said. “I grew up with the ideas of Liberation and unification.” He told his hosts he was glad “to help promote a strong and united Europe.”

He meant it as a program and a priority for his pontificate.

Metz sits in Lorraine, a region France and Germany fought over for generations, and Robert Schuman, the devout Catholic statesman who helped found the European project after the war, made his home just outside the city. Leo spoke at the convention center that carries Schuman’s name.

“Today, sadly, war has returned, even to Europe,” he told the religious and civic leaders there, calling it “a new ‘senseless slaughter,’ claiming countless civilian lives every day.” Dialogue and multilateralism, he said, “remain the best antidote to the desire for domination, which lies at the root of every conflict.”

At Mass in Metz Cathedral, he spoke to the children of a land “torn apart in the past by fratricidal conflicts.”

“It is not true that those who seek revenge are stronger than those who forgive,” he told them. A sentence like that, from the son of a D-Day sailor, is the moral case for the free world in miniature.

Robert Prevost has been pope for not quite seventeen months. His four days in France took him from the Élysée and UNESCO to the grotto at Lourdes, then east to Metz, where he asked a continent to hold together.

At the Élysée on Friday, he reminded France that liberty, equality, and fraternity “are not simply words emblazoned on the front of your public buildings; they refer to universal ethical imperatives.” That is a bold thing for an American, much less a pope of the universal Catholic Church, to say inside the French president’s own palace.

I have stared at this photograph more times than I can count over the past few days. Every time, I look at the man in the white cassock and say, with gut instinct and intellectual certainty both, Tu es Petrus.

You are Peter, and upon this rock Christ builds the Church.

Catholics believe the pope is the vicar of Christ, the Successor of Peter who acts and ministers in Jesus’s name.

With every passing day, this 71-year-old American, born Robert Francis Prevost, reminds me of Jesus. Then again, I guess that’s the point.

It is rare that I share a Wall Street Journal op-ed with you, but Gerard Baker, the paper’s editor at large, and I agree here:

He is the one man in the world most of us can look up to. Everywhere we look, we are led by a cartoon parade of the grotesque, the inept, the forgettable: political leaders of towering vanity and vapidity, a business leadership class that helps itself to greater riches even as it gets preachier with the rest of us, influencers and pop stars and celebrities, a galloping gallimaufry of narcissistic nobodies all desperately squeezing their last little crumb of manna from us.

Baker has no patience for the pope’s detractors at home either:

God knows, this pope has his critics. Nowhere more so than in his own land (as Jesus could have told him, that’s usually the way). In keeping with the simplistic tropes in which much American political discourse is now conducted, he is decried as “woke,” “liberal,” even a “communist.” It says a terrifying amount about what has happened to the American right that this man who urges governments to respect the sanctity of human life, desist from war, and observe the Christian gospel of charity for all is viewed as merely a lefty Chicago pol.

After recounting Peter Thiel’s charge that Leo is a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party, Baker closes this way:

I laughed out loud when I heard that. I thought about all those who had denounced the popes and the church they headed before him: the sans culottes, the guillotinists, the tricoteuses; all the rationalists, the Marxists, the humanists. I suspect popes will be inspiring men and women to simple human goodness long after our politicians and the tech oligarchs who seek to rule us have given up trying to perfect whatever it is they were put on earth to do.

It is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing about the office of the papacy, and about Leo himself, that I have ever read.

Some readers will object that a pope commands no army. The free world was never only an army, though. At its best it was a promise that free peoples would stand together for human dignity, and right now the man keeping that promise wears white.

Catholics in this country carry a particular duty here. You and I are called to widen the free world as well as defend it, and that work happens every day, in our parishes and at the ballot box five weeks from now. So let’s fight for it, and let’s honor Leo and the faith he leads by doing it.

Later, I’ll bring you a rundown of the new things we learned about Leo on this trip. For now, I simply want to give thanks for his journey to France and for the gift of his pontificate.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every Catholic, and every person of goodwill, who believes that the freedom our grandparents bled for on the beaches of Normandy belongs to the whole human family.

That freedom was never a possession to hoard. It was built on the dignity of every person made in the image of God, and it survives only when people choose each other across borders, the way France and Germany did in Metz when Robert Schuman turned old enemies into neighbors.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that shows up for the common good. They see it in an American pope blessing a child on the Champs-Élysées, and they want to be part of it.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing together for human dignity and a world that stays free, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

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Dear friends,

The son who comes out of today’s Gospel looking good is the one who told his father, to his face, that he wasn’t going.

Pope Leo XIV preached on these readings this morning at Lourdes, a town whose own parish priest started out as a flat no on Bernadette’s story, and I don’t think the timing is an accident.

Today we’ll look at why God seems to prefer an honest doubt to a pious act, and how a hard no can turn, slowly, into a yes.

These Scripture reflections are available exclusively to paid subscribers. If my work means something to you, I’m asking for your help.

If you’d like to invest in our mission during this critical time, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

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Today’s Readings

“He said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterwards changed his mind and went.” — Matthew 21:29

By the time we reach today’s Gospel, Jesus has ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, turned over the money changers’ tables, spent the night out in Bethany, and walked back into the temple the next morning to find the chief priests waiting for him with a question about his credentials. He answers them with a story about a vineyard.

A man has two sons. He asks the first to go work in the vineyard today, and the boy says no. Later he “changed his mind and went.” The second son says yes (very politely) and never goes.

I grew up Catholic in Tennessee, where “yes, sir” was about the first thing a boy learned to say to a grown man, whether he intended to do the thing or not. So I recognize the second son. Matthew gives him two words in Greek, egō, kyrie, roughly “I will, sir,” and kyrie happens to be the same word the disciples use when they talk to Jesus. The kid has the vocabulary of devotion down pat. His brother just says ou thelō. I don’t want to.

Jesus asks the chief priests which son did what his father wanted, they give the obvious answer, and he tells them the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of them. (Last Sunday it was the men hired at five o’clock who got paid first; Matthew has a habit of shuffling the line.)

What I keep returning to is the verb for the first son’s turn. Metamelētheis names a nagging second thought, the kind that follows you around the house until you give up and go find your work boots.

Matthew adds hysteron, “later,” and declines to say how much later. An hour? The whole afternoon? We aren’t told, and the father, for his part, doesn’t seem to care.

Pope Francis put it plainly in Evangelii Gaudium, the first major document of his pontificate: “A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties.”

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