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I know it’s late, but I can’t sleep, and today is the feast of St. Christopher, the saint whose name I carry, so I thought I would write you a letter.

Now, to be clear, my parents named me without religion in mind. In fact, Christopher was the second most popular name for boys born in the United States in 1989.

But as I grew up in Tennessee and began my own journey of faith, I found much more meaning in my birth name.

The Church knows almost nothing about St. Christopher. A third-century martyr, killed under Decius or maybe under Maximinus, the records give a death and a name and very little else.

Everything we love about him arrives through the Legenda aurea, Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives — a collection of fables rather than a documented history.

In it, a giant named Reprobus went looking for the greatest king in the world so that he could serve him. He quit the first emperor he found, who made the sign of the cross at the mention of the devil. Then he took service with the devil, until the devil swerved off the road to avoid a crucifix.

A hermit told him the king he was looking for was Christ, and handed him work suited to his frame: carrying travelers across a river that had drowned better swimmers than him.

One night a child asked to cross. Halfway over, the current rose and the boy on his shoulders grew so heavy that the giant was certain the river would take them both.

He reached the far bank. The child told him he had just carried the weight of the world, along with the one who made it.

They baptized him Christophoros — Christ-bearer.

Paul VI’s 1969 revision of the General Roman Calendar took Christopher off the universal list because the historical evidence was too thin to sustain a feast for the whole Church. Nobody de-canonized him.

July 25 is still kept in parishes across the world, medals are still blessed, and truck drivers and pilots and mothers watching a teenager back out of the driveway still reach for him.

There is something clarifying in that for me. My patron is a saint with a contested file and an unimpeachable job description: stand in the current, and get people to the other side. He is the patron of all of us traveling on a journey.

Notice that the legend never shows Christopher praying on the bank. He is always in the water, mid-crossing, under a load that keeps getting heavier. His holiness is a matter of motion.

On March 14, 2013, the morning after his election, Pope Francis preached to the cardinals who had just chosen him. He built the entire homily on movement — journeying, building, professing — and gave a line that has become a motto of sorts for me: “Journeying: our life is a journey, and when we stop moving, things go wrong.”

He described the failure mode too. Build on anything other than stone, he told those cardinals, and you get what children get on the beach: the sandcastle is swept away, and nothing solid remains underneath.

Thirteen years later, that reads like a diagnosis of American life. So much of this nation has not moved forward in a generation. A political Catholicism mistook stasis for fidelity and let the cruelest voices in this country define what our faith demands of us. Water rises fastest on the people standing still.

Verso l’alto

Pier Giorgio Frassati never stood still. He was a Turinese kid from a wealthy and largely irreligious family, a Third Order Dominican, an alpinist, a street-level agitator who brawled with Mussolini’s blackshirts and quietly spent his allowance on the poor of his city.

Polio killed him at twenty-four in 1925, most likely caught from the sick he was visiting, and his family discovered at the funeral that the streets of Turin were packed with mourners they had never met.

On a photograph from his final climb he wrote two words: verso l’alto. To the heights.

Pope Leo XIV canonized him on September 7, 2025, alongside Carlo Acutis — the first saints of this pontificate. In the homily, Leo pointed straight at that photograph: a young man climbing in the Val di Lanzo, face turned toward his goal, and the inscription in his own hand.

Understand what the phrase is doing. Frassati wrote it on the way up rather than from the summit. Direction is the entire content of it. He kept moving, and in that journey, found life.

What Benedict knew

This is where I part company with a version of Catholicism I run into every day online — the kind that treats the faith as a fixed set of correct propositions to be defended against the wrong people. Our faith has propositions, and I hold them.

But Benedict XVI opened Deus Caritas Est by refusing to let propositions be the foundation: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

A new horizon and a decisive direction. Both phrases matter equally. We look up towards a new horizon. And we look out towards a clear direction.

Benedict — the professor, the systematician, the man who spent twenty-four years as the Church’s chief doctrinal officer before his election — put the encounter first and the system second.

Christianity begins as something that happens to you. What follows is a road.

What we are building

Tens of thousands of us have had that encounter and cannot reconcile it with what is being done to this country under the banner of our faith. That gap is why Letters from Leo exists.

The project here is to take that experience — the encounter itself, the thing that reorganizes a life — and rebuild a nation on the highest of what it teaches us: the dignity of every person regardless of paperwork, the common good understood as an obligation rather than a slogan, a preferential option for the poor, and solidarity as a decision you make about strangers.

Underneath all of it sits the claim that makes us genuinely dangerous to this political moment.

We believe in redemption.

Think about what that commits us to. The man in the detention facility in Louisiana is not a finished case, and neither is the addict, the felon, the deported father, or the kid nobody ever picked first. The country that did all of this to them can still become something else.

And neither are you a lost cause.

Authoritarian movements need human beings to be permanently what they have been labeled — the criminal alien, the enemy within, the vermin, the problem. They need us to be hopeless. Redemption detonates that. No idea in our politics cuts deeper, and we hold it on divine authority.

The pattern of the job

So here is what my patron means to me on his feast. He gives me the pattern of the work: stand in the current where it runs hardest, take the weight when it doubles, get people to the far bank.

And the story is honest about the cost. You go under. The child is heavier than the world because the child is holding the world, and no version of carrying leaves you dry.

Everyone doing this work in America right now knows that weight precisely — the priests at the border, the nuns posting bond, the parishioners who show up at an ICE check-in so that somebody is there as a witness.

We are not going to stop moving. This country will be rebuilt on the dignity it keeps promising and withholding, and the rebuilding will be done by people who refuse to believe that anyone is beyond saving.

Verso l’alto. Toward the heights — from wherever you are standing when you read this, in whatever water you are already in.

To everyone who has been knocked down, counted out, or left behind, this is your home.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with every person in this country who has been told they are a closed case — and with the Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to accept that verdict about anyone, including their enemies.

We stand with the carriers — Catholics and countless others of goodwill who keep moving when the water rises, refuse to accept cruelty as the price of order in America, and still believe this nation can be rebuilt on the dignity of every person in it.

We are rooted in a faith that began as an encounter rather than an argument, and that encounter obligates us. It sends us into the water where the current runs hardest, on behalf of the people the powerful have written off.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are starving for something sturdier than rage and propaganda. They want a moral vision that can carry weight, and right now the weight is enormous.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a politics built on permanent condemnation — I am asking you to join us.

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

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Pope Leo XIV named Archbishop Christophe-Zakhia El-Kassis the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations on Saturday, handing the Vatican’s seat in New York to a Maronite priest born in Beirut while Israeli troops still hold ground inside southern Lebanon.

El-Kassis is 57. He was born in Beirut on August 24, 1968, ordained for the Maronite Archeparchy of Beirut in May 1994, and entered the papal diplomatic service in June 2000. Nunciature postings in Indonesia, Sudan and Turkey came first, followed by more than a decade handling relations with states inside the Secretariat of State.

Pope Francis made him an archbishop in November 2018 and sent him to Pakistan. He became the first nuncio the Holy See has ever posted to the United Arab Emirates in January 2023, adding Yemen and the whole Arabian Peninsula to his territory eighteen months later. He works in eight languages, Arabic and Indonesian among them.

He replaces Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Italian diplomat Leo pulled out of New York in March and installed as nuncio to the United States.

The Vatican bulletin carried the appointment as a routine line under the day’s nominations. Per custom, there was no press conference and no explanatory note.

So I went back through the record myself. Seven men have held the post since the Holy See opened its observer mission in 1964 — Alberto Giovannetti, Giovanni Cheli, Renato Martino, Celestino Migliore, Francis Chullikatt, Bernardito Auza and Caccia — and five of the seven were Italians, the exceptions being an Indian and a Filipino.

El-Kassis breaks the pattern two ways. He is the first bishop from the Middle East, and the first Eastern Catholic in a line that has otherwise belonged entirely to the Latin Church.

Leo has also, for the first time, given the job to a man whose home region is majority Muslim and whose Church has spent its whole history as a minority inside the Islamic world.

The seat is a strange one. The Holy See sits at the UN as a permanent observer state, a status shared with exactly one other entity, the State of Palestine. El-Kassis may address the General Assembly, co-sponsor documents, circulate texts and exercise a right of reply, though no ballot is ever placed in his hands. What the Vatican brings to that room is a moral argument, and Leo has just given it a Middle Eastern accent.

The country he comes from is still being shelled

Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel on March 2 for the first time since the November 2024 ceasefire, days after the American-Israeli strikes on Iran and the assassination of Ali Khamenei. Israeli divisions crossed into southern Lebanon two weeks later. By late June, Al Jazeera counted more than 4,000 dead and 1.2 million Lebanese driven from their homes, better than a fifth of the country.

A framework agreement signed at the State Department on June 26 ties an Israeli pullback to the verified disarmament of Hezbollah. Naim Qassem, the group’s secretary-general, called the deal “null and void,” and Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will hold its buffer zone until the disarmament happens. An Israeli drone hit a car in Nabatieh al-Fawqa on July 6, killing four people, among them a school principal and her mother.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun spent nearly two hours in the Oval Office on Tuesday asking Donald Trump for a withdrawal and reconstruction money. “It’s been a very badly treated place and country,” Trump said of Lebanon, “and we’re going to have it properly treated.”

Leo knows the terrain personally. He landed at Beirut airport on November 30 last year, prayed at the tomb of St. Charbel in Annaya, stood in silence at the port where the 2020 explosion killed hundreds, and closed the trip with a Mass on the Beirut waterfront that drew roughly 150,000 people.

The priest, the parish, and the phone calls

On the afternoon of March 9, an Israeli Merkava tank fired a shell into a house in Qlayaa, a Christian village in the Marjayoun district. The blast wounded the family inside. Father Pierre El-Rahi, the Maronite pastor who had refused an Israeli evacuation order days earlier, ran toward the house with several young men from the village, and a second shell killed him.

The Holy See Press Office put out a statement of papal sorrow that night. Two days later at his general audience, Leo called El-Rahi “a true shepherd, who always stayed beside his people, with the love and sacrifice of Jesus the Good Shepherd,” and prayed “that the blood he shed be a seed of peace for beloved Lebanon.” I wrote about that killing here.

Ten weeks into Leo’s pontificate, Israeli shelling had struck Holy Family Church in Gaza City, the only Catholic parish in the strip, where about 500 displaced people were sheltering. Saad Salameh, the 60-year-old janitor, died in the yard, along with Fumayya Ayyad, who was 84, and Najwa Abu Daoud, who was in her seventies. The Israeli military later attributed the strike to “an unintentional deviation of munitions.”

Netanyahu telephoned the pope the next day to express regret. At the Angelus that Sunday, Leo called for an immediate end to “the barbarity of the war” and insisted that every party respect the prohibition on collective punishment and the indiscriminate use of force.

Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest wounded in that strike, is Argentine — a countryman of Pope Francis, who telephoned Holy Family at seven o’clock nearly every evening from the first weeks after October 7, 2023. Francis asked the parishioners what they had eaten for dinner and told them, “I am with you, don’t be afraid.” His last call to Gaza came on Holy Saturday 2025, two days before he died.

What Jerusalem will read into this

Relations between the Vatican and Netanyahu’s government have been raw for two years. Israel’s foreign ministry summoned the nuncio, Archbishop Adolfo Tito Yllana, on Christmas Eve 2024 after Francis called the machine-gunning of Gaza’s children an act of cruelty, though the ministry took care to describe the meeting as something short of a reprimand.

Its embassy to the Holy See went after Cardinal Pietro Parolin publicly in October 2025, objecting that he had applied the word massacre both to Hamas’s attack of October 7 and to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state that protects its citizens and a terrorist organisation that tries to kill them,” the embassy said. Leo backed his secretary of state that same day, telling reporters that Parolin had “very clearly expressed the Holy See’s position.”

Israeli police barred Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa from the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday this year, and the Vatican protested to Ambassador Yaron Sideman — the same envoy who had told Crux eleven days earlier that the Iran war was “the most just war conceivable.”

Underneath the diplomacy sits a pattern of street-level violence that Christians in the Holy Land have documented for years. Israel’s Religious Freedom Data Center recorded 83 acts of harassment against Christians between April and June, nearly double the previous quarter, with spitting accounting for 56 percent of them. A French nun researching at the École biblique was thrown to the ground and kicked near the Cenacle in April. Outside Jerusalem’s Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in May, a crowd shouted “Death to Christians.” I have been writing on this crisis all year.

Into that room walks a Maronite archbishop from Beirut.

Personnel is policy — and in Catholicism, doctrine

Leo has stayed thoughtful with his words, but has moved boldly in who carries his voice on these issues. He declined a seat on Trump’s Gaza peace board in February, has fought the Iran war from the pulpit week after week, and has now put the Church’s permanent voice at the United Nations in the hands of a man whose country buries his own priests.

Catholic teaching holds that the poor and the wounded are never merely subjects to be discussed by their betters. Solidarity means the injured party gets a chair and a microphone. For sixty-two years the Holy See promoted peace in the Middle East at the United Nations through envoys who flew in from Rome, and starting now, the argument will be made by someone from the neighborhood who has experienced the pain of this war in the flesh.

That is what lifts this above a personnel note. Grieving Father El-Rahi at a Wednesday audience was an act of pastoral care; seating his countryman in the General Assembly carries consequences, because the governments that found this pope’s words inconvenient will find his diplomat considerably harder to ignore.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Christians of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank who have buried their dead without cameras, and with everyone of goodwill who refuses to accept that a priest running toward wounded neighbors is a tolerable cost of anyone’s war.

The Gospel makes a public claim about the world — that every human being carries the image of God, and that any government treating some lives as expendable is telling a lie about creation itself.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith with a spine, one that names the dead, tells the truth about who killed them, and refuses to bow to the idols of fear and force.

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

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

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Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja held a press conference at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas, on Thursday and spoke publicly for the first time about her June 28 arrest by federal agents who handcuffed her on her way to Mass.

“Honestly, in that moment, I did not understand what was going on, what was happening to me,” she said.

On that Sunday morning, the 56-year-old Nigerian sister of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy left her residence dressed in her habit, carrying a rosary, a key, and a phone when two armed ICE agents stopped her about a block from home.

They handcuffed her and drove her an hour away to the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville. She recalled asking the agents, “Can I go to Mass; can I just attend Mass; can I receive communion,” and being told no.

“For me, a nun, not to go to Mass on Sunday, not to receive Communion, it was very, very heartbreaking for me,” she told reporters.

Sister Letty is a registered nurse at South Texas Health System, and before that she spent a decade as a certified nursing assistant in Edinburg. She volunteers as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at her local parish.

In 2019, an immigration judge denied her asylum claim yet barred the government from deporting her to Nigeria, ruling that she would likely face torture there. She has a valid work authorization, and her attorney, Carlos Moctezuma Garcia, says she has complied with every requirement imposed by immigration authorities.

As I reported at the time, the local Church raised the alarm within hours.

Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz joined Democratic Congressmen Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez in pressing Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for her release, and by early evening, Cuellar announced she was on her way home.

Nearly a month later, the government has explained nothing behind the arrest. DHS and ICE have ignored four weeks of press inquiries about why agents seized a Catholic nun an immigration judge had already shielded from deportation.

Garcia says the Department of Homeland Security indicated the government planned to remove her to an unknown third country.

She is due at an ICE check-in on Tuesday.

“We are asking that she not be detained and that no ankle monitor be placed on a person who has broken no rule, posed no danger, and given this country a decade of nursing and a lifetime of ministry,” Garcia said.

Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, who has spent weeks seeking answers from the Administration, called Sister Letty “a well-known source of goodness and hope in our community.”

“Homeland Security enforcement protocols that make it possible for a religious sister, or anyone, to be detained and handcuffed while peacefully walking to Church on a Sunday morning are wildly disturbing and need to be reformed,” the prelate argued.

Her case sits inside a season of open aggression against the Catholic Church from the Trump-Vance White House.

Yesterday I wrote about the Trump administration’s lawsuit to seize the ground beneath Mount Cristo Rey, the border shrine near El Paso where a 29-foot limestone Christ the King has drawn pilgrims for nearly a century. A federal judge has already passed the property’s title to the government while the Diocese of Las Cruces fights on.

Earlier this month, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Durán Guerrero, two Catholic men on their way to work.

The U.S. bishops issued a rebuke, warning that acts that diminish human dignity “should never be normalized in our society.”

The prevailing force behind every one of these stories is the White House’s January 2025 decision to scrap the decades-old policy that kept immigration enforcement away from churches, schools, and hospitals.

Catholic teaching is clear. The Church that Sister Letty serves as a nun teaches that every human being carries a dignity that comes from God and that no government can revoke.

Pope Leo XIV drew the line months ago: “Someone who says I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

Sister Letty put the same truth in the plainest terms available to her. “I’m just a small woman, a nun, harmless, just with my rosary, my key, and my phone,” she said. “I will not pretend, it did hurt, and it’s still hurting me up to today.”

“There are many others in this same situation, people who have been given some form of protection under our laws, who have followed every rule asked of them, and who still live with uncertainty,” she said.

Every person facing that uncertainty, she added, “deserves to be heard, deserves to be listened to, deserves to be given attention and opportunity.”

On Tuesday, she will find out whether the government intends to shackle an ankle monitor to a nurse who has spent her time in the United States healing the sick and bringing the Eucharist to her neighbors.

She told reporters she was reflecting on the day’s Mass readings when the agents stopped her. The handcuffs interrupted her prayer, but nothing in her testimony on Thursday suggests they ever reached the heart of her faith — a faith, she said, that “teaches me not to be silent.”

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Sister Letty and with the thousands of foreign-born priests, sisters, and religious workers who hold the Church in the United States together — the women and men who staff our hospitals, carry Communion to the homebound, and now watch the street for unmarked cars on their way to Sunday Mass.

In an era when a government sues the Church for the ground beneath a statue of Christ and handcuffs a nurse in her habit, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to look away when the powerful come for the small.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than cruelty dressed up as order.

People come here looking for courage, for truth, and for love made visible — and Sister Letty offered all three from the front of her parish church on Thursday.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a deportation machine that seizes a nun off the sidewalk on her way to Mass — I am asking you to join us.

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

• 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.

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Earlier this week, a letter from the Washington law firm Cooper & Kirk arrived in my inbox. The firm represents Word on Fire, Bishop Robert Barron’s media company, and the subject line announced a “NOTICE OF LEGAL ACTION.” The letter itself is something slightly less than the subject line advertises: a threat of one.

The lawyers ask for a correction of a July 8 post of mine, which said that Barron’s YouTube views had “been on a nosedive during the past year of his MAGA conversion.”

In the letter, David H. Thompson of Cooper & Kirk writes that Word on Fire’s internal figures show the channel’s viewership more than doubling over the past year, with subscriber growth up 85 percent, and warns of “potential legal action” if I decline to correct the record.

For legal authority, the letter leans on the Covington Catholic teenager’s defamation suit against the New York Times — a suit the teenager lost. By his own team’s accounting, then, Bishop Barron’s audience is growing, a fact I am happy to place on the record here, in contradiction of my tweet.

Here is the letter — dated July 14, though it did not reach my inbox until July 21. Read it closely. Do you notice what’s missing?

At no point does the letter ask me to retract the charge that gave my post its sting: that Bishop Barron has gone full MAGA.

His lawyers dispute my arithmetic. The thesis of more than a year of reporting in this community — that America’s most famous bishop has converted to Trumpism — apparently stands uncontested.

Bishop Barron recently gave a softball interview to Vice President JD Vance, and he has spent the summer falling deeper and deeper into the MAGA abyss.

Notice what stirs the empire to legal action. Trump’s April attack on Pope Leo earned from Barron a single statement of protest and then months of accommodation. An incorrect tweet about YouTube analytics, by contrast, summoned a Washington law firm.

Bishop Barron has become more interested in defending his stats than in defending the pope and the church against this administration.

Here is what makes the threat interesting: a lawsuit opens the door to discovery, and discovery runs in both directions. A defamation plaintiff puts his reputation at issue — and there is a lot to answer for.

Seven weeks of new material

They chose a busy stretch to write me. When I last covered Barron on June 2, he had just accused Catholics on the left of trying to “demonize” Donald Trump. The seven weeks since have given Rome, and the rest of us, plenty to study.

On June 29, Barron posted a long statement on X warning that politicians “who identify as extreme socialists or communists” were finding success in America, and reminding his followers that “Karl Marx said that the first critique is the critique of religion.”

Three days later, Fox News published the argument as an op-ed under the headline “The real reason communists fear religion and want believers silenced.”

The communism theme carried into this week. In a video he posted on Tuesday, Barron said the rise of “democratic socialism” should be recognized as communism. “Take them seriously; they mean what they say,” he warned, telling his “fellow believers” that “it’s time to speak up and to speak out.”

That clip was Barron’s second swing of the month at New York’s mayor. On July 3, he pronounced Mamdani’s address for the nation’s 250th anniversary “appalling,” the fruit of “the Marxism that, sadly, is all the rage today.”

Three days later, his podcast gave a full episode to America’s birthday, warm recollections of the Trump-backed Mall rally included.

Notice, too, the strange obsession. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City; Barron shepherds Winona-Rochester, 1,140 miles away. The pastor actually charged with Mamdani’s soul — Archbishop Hicks, the mayor’s own ordinary — has chosen engagement with his new mayor over long-distance denunciation.

There is a problem with the bishop’s new crusade against democratic socialism, and its name is Benedict XVI. Writing in First Things in January 2006, the late pope surveyed the political traditions of the West and rendered this judgment, which I quote in full:

But in Europe, in the nineteenth century, the two models were joined by a third, socialism, which quickly split into two different branches, one totalitarian and the other democratic.

Democratic socialism managed to fit within the two existing models as a welcome counterweight to the radical liberal positions, which it developed and corrected. It also managed to appeal to various denominations.

In England it became the political party of the Catholics, who had never felt at home among either the Protestant conservatives or the liberals.

In Wilhelmine Germany, too, Catholic groups felt closer to democratic socialism than to the rigidly Prussian and Protestant conservative forces.

In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.

Close to Catholic social doctrine — that is the verdict of the most theologically conservative pope of the modern era. Barron now sells the opposite claim as orthodoxy, and Fox News runs it as an op-ed.

On July 17, Word on Fire released Barron’s sit-down interview with Vice President JD Vance, taped in the pool house of the vice president’s residence in Washington. The Daily Wire carried the first clip as an exclusive.

And on Monday, Barron announced his new target: empathy.

“Suicidal empathy”

“I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy,” the bishop wrote on X. He ranked it, alongside Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution and Helen Pluckrose and anti-Catholic provocateur James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, among “the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy.”

Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, argues that Western compassion for migrants, trans people, and criminals amounts to civilizational self-harm. Elon Musk carried the idea to Joe Rogan’s audience last year, declaring that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Barron softened the edges, as he always does. Empathy, he allowed, is “in itself a perfectly decent trait,” though it must yield to love, which “can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings.” His examples told the real story: biological men in women’s sports, “unqualified candidates” in universities and corporations, a meritocracy supposedly smeared as “white privilege.”

A Catholic bishop spent his Monday teaching one of the largest Catholic audiences online to ration its compassion. The church he serves teaches something else. Jesus told his followers that the nations would be judged on precisely the impulse Saad pathologizes: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”

Follow Saad’s logic to its end, and it arrives at blasphemy: Jesus Christ on the cross — dying freely for people who could give him nothing in return — is the purest example of suicidal empathy in human history. A bishop, of all people, might have noticed.

Pope Francis addressed this exact argument in one of the final letters of his life, after Vance invoked ordo amoris to defend mass deportation. Christian love, Francis wrote to the American bishops in February 2025, is discovered by meditating on the Good Samaritan — a love that builds “a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

The response

The reaction from Catholic writers came fast. D.W. Lafferty, the Canadian independent scholar who has tracked Word on Fire’s drift for years, wrote that Saad’s concept amounts to “giving oneself permission to ridicule, demonize, and scapegoat,” and that Barron’s charitable gloss on the book betrays “ignorance of what it’s all really about.”

Daniel Rober, who chairs the Catholic studies department at Sacred Heart University, pointed to the evangelical cost: “Barron going full Fox News Uncle also makes it a lot easier to convince otherwise neutral people this isn’t a great evangelical approach.” In the anti-empathy movement’s rewrite of Christianity, Rober added, “the stuff about helping the poor and weak is jettisoned in favor of concepts like ‘suicidal empathy.’”

The magazines have started catching up with the tweets. In America, Emory theologian Susan Bigelow Reynolds wrote in June that “from the standpoint of integrity, Bishop Barron’s rapprochement with the manosphere has been disastrous.”

At National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters concluded that Barron “too often reverts to bumper sticker slogans that are false and, worse, unhelpful.” Deacon Steven Greydanus, who has chronicled what he calls the MAGAfication of a US bishop, judged it “scandalous” for Barron to repeat Vance’s complaints about Vatican “platitudes” without correction.

Commonweal knows this ecosystem well. Word on Fire twice sent the magazine cease-and-desist letters over a Massimo Faggioli essay on Catholicism and Trumpism, a campaign NCR documented in 2024. This week’s letter to me is part and parcel of how Barron and his team operate.

The record: two years of partisan acceleration

Do not take my word for the trend. Here is the public, too-often partisan record of America’s most famous bishop over the past two years — every entry documented, most in his own words:

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Last week, Rep. Veronica Escobar, the El Paso Democrat, introduced the Mount Cristo Rey Protection Act, a bill to stop the federal government from taking Catholic Church land for Donald Trump’s border wall.

Not a single member of Congress has joined her as a co-sponsor.

That empty list should trouble anyone who claims religious liberty as a cause, because the story behind the bill is stark: the Trump-Vance administration is suing the Catholic Church to seize the ground beneath a statue of Jesus Christ.

Through my own reporting, I can tell you the bill has more life than the co-sponsor count suggests. Congressional insiders describe a genuine effort to build support for Escobar’s legislation, with hopes of attaching its protections to a must-pass spending bill later this year.

At Letters from Leo, we are working to raise awareness of this fight and the broader assault on migrants it belongs to.

Start with the mountain itself. Mount Cristo Rey rises above Sunland Park, New Mexico, at the point where Texas, New Mexico, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua meet. A 29-foot limestone statue of Christ the King has crowned its summit since 1939, carved on-site by the Catalan sculptor Urbici Soler.

More than 40,000 pilgrims climb the mountain every year, chiefly on Good Friday and the Feast of Christ the King — some barefoot, a few finishing the ascent on their knees.

On May 7, the Department of Justice filed a condemnation lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which owns most of the mountain. The government wants 14.259 acres at its base — a strip roughly 190 feet wide along the border, where contractors are building 1.3 miles of 30-foot steel bollard wall under a $95 million contract.

For the land, the government deposited $183,071 with the federal court in New Mexico. Its own appraisers valued a neighboring 7.3-acre parcel belonging to the state at $798,500 — half the acreage at more than four times the price.

The machinery moved long before the lawsuit did. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived more than 20 federal laws at the site in June 2025, including the National Historic Preservation Act.

Blasting began on the mountain’s southern flank this spring, even though 211 of the 224 public comments submitted to Customs and Border Protection opposed the project. Border Patrol uploaded video of the blasts to social media; an earlier post had boasted that the mountain was getting a “face lift.”

The diocese answered with the Constitution and with canon law.

Its lawyers — the same Georgetown team that defended a South Texas chapel against the first Trump administration’s wall — argue that walling off a pilgrimage site substantially burdens the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and that church property of this significance cannot be surrendered without the Holy See’s consent.

On July 6, the diocese demanded a jury trial.

The Justice Department’s reply came Monday, in a motion for judgment on the pleadings before Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales: “federal law recognizes no other valid objection that a landowner may lodge to prevent the Government’s use of its eminent domain power.” A hearing set for July 23 in Las Cruces was postponed.

Sit with that claim for a moment. Lawyers for the United States told a federal judge that the worship of 40,000 pilgrims raises no objection the law can hear.

Bishop Peter Baldacchino of Las Cruces has met the bulldozers with liturgy. He celebrated Mass at the summit on June 28 beside hundreds of pilgrims and El Paso’s Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Celino, weeks after warning that “the erection of a physical symbol of division and dehumanization on the holy site of Mount Cristo Rey would shatter the sacredness of that cherished place.”

His chancellor, Deacon Jim Winder, needed fewer words: “Our symbol was there first. The wall is an in-your-face insult.”

The diocese’s legal brief is stark: “The wall is a physical manifestation of this government’s attitude toward migrants. Nothing could be less Catholic.”

El Paso’s Bishop Mark Seitz, whose people have climbed the mountain since the statue rose, endorsed Escobar’s bill as a demand that the federal government “set aside a heavy-handed abuse of power against this sacred place.”

Pope Pius XI created the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, three years after Mussolini seized power in Italy, through the encyclical Quas Primas. The feast teaches the baptized that no state holds their final loyalty. A century later, the American government intends to run a steel wall beneath the statue that bears the feast’s name — and its lawyers insist that nobody may lodge a valid objection.

Pope Leo XIV has already told the world what he thinks of walls. In Madrid last month, during a visit that drew more than a million people into the streets, the first American pope urged the faithful to tear down the walls that divide. He spent America’s 250th birthday among the migrants of Lampedusa. At a landing dock in the Canary Islands where thousands of migrants have come ashore, he said: “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.”

The administration governs as though none of that had been said. Its agents killed two Catholic workers on their way to work this month, drawing a rebuke from U.S. bishops. JD Vance, the highest-ranking Catholic in the federal government, published a book this summer about finding God; the government he helps lead now argues in open court that a mountain consecrated to Christ the King is 14 acres of right-of-way.

There is a way to win. In 2019, the government went after La Lomita Chapel in Mission, Texas — the 19th-century mission church that gave the city its name. Bishop Daniel Flores refused to consent, Georgetown’s lawyers fought the case, and Congress ultimately wrote protections for the chapel into an appropriations bill.

Two weeks ago, Homeland Security agreed to route new wall construction behind the chapel rather than cut it off from its people.

Escobar’s allies intend to run the same play for Mount Cristo Rey, and a growing list of co-sponsors forces appropriators to pay attention. Public pressure builds that list.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Baldacchino, the pilgrims of Mount Cristo Rey, and the millions of American Catholics and neighbors of goodwill who understand that sacred ground was never federal inventory.

In an era when cruelty arrives dressed as policy, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to bow before the idols of fear and division.

This has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for courage, for truth, and for love made visible in action — and a government suing the Church for the land beneath a statue of Jesus has made that hunger impossible to ignore.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a state that would wall off holy ground — I am asking you to join us.

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

• 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.

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Paid members receive exclusive essays on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the investigations that built this community — including the Epstein-Bannon files — and our Sunday scripture reflections.

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Today’s essay takes you inside Leone a Roma, the Vatican’s new documentary on Pope Leo XIV’s Roman years — with timestamps for every revelation. The first, starring a booby-trapped alarm clock and a laxative disguised as candy, is free for everyone.

The other five, from a quiet walk through China’s churches to the crash in the Andes, belong to the paid members who sustain this community.

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On July 1, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication premiered Leone a Roma — “Leo in Rome” — a 55-minute documentary retracing the years Robert Francis Prevost spent in the Eternal City, from his arrival as a deacon-student in 1981 to the Dicastery for Bishops.

Vatican journalists Felipe Herrera-Espaliat, Salvatore Cernuzio, and Tiziana Campisi built the film from archival footage and the voices of people who knew him long before the white cassock: Augustinian friars from the Curia where he governed the order, cloistered nuns in Montefalco and Cascia, the families of Cesano and Genazzano, and officials of the Dicastery for Bishops.

I was invited to the premiere at the Vatican earlier this month, and the film charmed me from its opening frames. So did the craft of the team behind it — including Cernuzio, whose reporting in Padre, his book on the fatherhood of Pope Francis, I wrote about in April. The film is in Italian with English subtitles, and you can watch it in full on YouTube.

Reading the film alongside everything Letters from Leo has published on the pope’s life over the past year, I found six moments that revealed something I did not know — along with new images of our pope that the world had simply never seen. Each moment below carries its timestamp, so you can find it yourself and watch these witnesses speak in their own words.

Consider this a first dispatch. Later this summer I will publish a broader look at the Vatican’s full trilogy on the pope — León de Perú, Leo from Chicago, and now Leone a Roma — three films that together give us more of Robert Prevost than any biography yet written.

1. The pranks of his student Rome: a booby-trapped alarm clock and a laxative disguised as candy [13:13 – 15:15]

The film’s most disarming stretch belongs to an Augustinian friar from Prevost’s student years, who lights up describing life at the international college. “The wonderful thing was that, besides study and prayer, we also had times of recreation,” he says — recitals and evenings of entertainment that took real work to prepare. “That time was essential for building these bonds of fraternity.”

Then come the practical jokes. “They played so many on me — so many, yes,” he admits. One night he went to bed and heard a drone he took for an airplane outside his window; the brothers had hidden a ringing alarm clock on top of his wardrobe.

“They said to me, ‘Here, I would like to offer you a candy.’ So I thought it was a candy, but instead it was a laxative tablet. As a result, while I was in the chapel I had to run to the bathroom.”

That one came at a gathering with the Jesuits, of all people. And as the friar tells it, the editors cut to a photograph of a young Bob Prevost grinning ear to ear [14:50] — the film’s wordless verdict on where the mischief lived. We have met the pope of encyclicals and diplomacy. This is the world that formed him: young religious who studied until dawn, prayed together, and hid alarm clocks on top of one another’s wardrobes.

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Pope Leo XIV called for nuclear disarmament on Tuesday in a new book from the Vatican’s own publishing house, writing that “it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament.”

The book — Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, edited by the Italian journalist Alessandro Banfi and released today in Italian by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana — collects the pope’s addresses on peace since his election, opening with a foreword from Leo himself. An English edition is due out soon.

Among the authorities Leo summons is an American songwriter. “As singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan wrote, figuratively addressing the atomic bomb,” the pope writes, quoting “Go Away You Bomb,” the unreleased lyrics Dylan wrote against nuclear war in 1963: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled.”

The pope has seemingly reached for Dylan before. Preaching at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Bamenda, Cameroon, in April, he declared that “the masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild” — an apparent echo of “Masters of War,” the protest song Dylan released that same year, 1963.

He signed that foreword at the Vatican on June 19, one day after Donald Trump stood in the Palace of Versailles and signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran promising the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.”

The promise did not survive a month. American warplanes have bombed Iran through more than a week of consecutive nights, an Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Jordan killed two American service members late last week and left a third missing, and Iranian drones struck American facilities in Kuwait and Bahrain on Monday. The war has now killed sixteen Americans.

Peace was supposedly all but finished. Scott Jennings announced in late May that a senior administration official had told him the Iran deal was “95 percent” agreed. Donald Trump Jr. celebrated the framework the next day as “a HUGE win for America,” boasting that his father was achieving “exactly” what he promised on Iran.

A White House that was “95 percent” done with peace in May is bombing Iran’s coastline in July. Vice President JD Vance negotiated the framework now burning; Trump has taken to telling reporters the two men are “philosophically” different on the war — though the vice president has stood by him as the conflict grinds into its fifth month.

Leo’s foreword reads like a dispatch from a man watching all of it. “Today, a good 103 states are involved in some way in a war on Earth,” he writes. “Weapons boom and kill in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Yemen, in Congo, and in many other situations.”

He reaches back to John Paul II’s warning that the recourse to war has become “an adventure with no return.” He worries about autonomous weapons — “a world in which machines, albeit sophisticated and faster than us, are the ones to decide to bomb defenseless people would be truly frightening” — extending the argument of Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence.

The fear is personal for him. On the first day of the renewed war, American missiles destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, killing more than a hundred children — and the parents of the dead wrote to Pope Leo, telling him they now press their children’s “burned bags and bloody notebooks” to their chests. As I reported in April, the letter moved him deeply. Questions about how, and by what, the school was targeted remain open.

Then he asks: “Must the human species continue to inhabit the Earth? The combination of the cyber domain and global rearmament impels one to seriously ask this question.”

The foreword closes with gratitude that God has placed us “among the present problems,” and with a charge: “It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.”

The pope against the war

The collection doubles as a record of Leo’s confrontation with this war.

He condemned the campaign within days of its renewal, pleading at his March 1 Angelus for the parties “to assume the moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss.” Stability and peace, he said that morning, are built “only through a reasonable, authentic, and responsible dialogue,” never with “weapons, which sow destruction, pain, and death.”

Through Lent, he implored Trump to find an off-ramp and end the war by Easter.

Trump answered on Truth Social. He branded Leo “Weak on Nuclear Weapons,” declared that “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” and boasted that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

The pope took the question aboard the papal plane to Algeria in April: “I am not afraid of the Trump administration. I speak about the Gospel, I am not a politician.”

He answered the nuclear smear directly, telling reporters outside Castel Gandolfo on May 5: “The Church has spoken for years against all nuclear weapons, so there is no doubt there.”

By June the judgment was formal. “There is no just war there,” he told reporters en route to Madrid, adding that just-war theory “comes from centuries past when we couldn’t imagine the weapons, human beings’ ability for destruction.”

A city-state of 800 souls

This month the administration tried a new argument. Brian Burch, Trump’s ambassador to the Holy See, told the New York Times on July 9 that Leo had issued his judgment “not as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ, but only as the sovereign political leader of the Vatican City State.” The pope could not truly judge the war, Burch reasoned, because he holds only “a set of limited facts.”

Vatican City covers 121 acres and houses roughly 800 residents. By Burch’s arithmetic, the man who condemned this war speaks for a population smaller than a midsize parish festival.

The Vatican rejected the theory in writing. On July 13, Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Vatican’s communications dicastery, published a response approved at the Vatican’s higher levels: “The pope always speaks as a shepherd.” Even on war and peace, Tornielli wrote, “the Successor of Peter remains, above all, a spiritual leader” — a pastor to 1.4 billion Catholics whose temporal sovereignty Paul VI once called “tiny and practically symbolic.”

The making of a disarmed pope

Burch’s theory carries a further, fatal defect: Robert Prevost was preaching this peace decades before he acquired a state to speak for.

The cardinals who elected him knew exactly what they were choosing. In The Election of Pope Leo XIV, Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué record Cardinal Charles Maung Bo of Yangon warning in the days before the conclave that “more than thirteen thousand nuclear weapons remain armed and ready to destroy human civilization several times over,” and that “a single spark of hatred could unleash a nuclear holocaust, turning cities to ash, rivers to poison, and the sky to darkness.”

Start with the first words of the papacy. On the evening of May 8, 2025, the new pope stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and greeted the world: “Peace be with you all!” The peace of the risen Christ, he said that night, is “a disarmed peace and a disarming peace, humble and persevering.” Today’s title repeats the words he chose in his first hour as pope.

The lineage runs deeper still. In American Hope, his portrait of the pope, Christopher Lamb records that Prevost was ordained a deacon in 1981 by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton — a founding member of the peace group Pax Christi USA, arrested for civil disobedience protesting nuclear weapons. The bishop who first laid hands on the future pope spent his own life demanding the abolition of the bomb.

Two years later he marched himself. On October 22, 1983, roughly one million people filled Rome to protest NATO’s deployment of cruise missiles at Comiso, in Sicily, and among them walked Father Prevost, then a canon-law student in the city, carrying a sign that read “Agostiniani per la Pace” — “Augustinians for Peace.”

The photograph of that moment, taken by the Stigmatine priest Gianni Novelli, resurfaced after his election — and became a controversy, because the coalition that organized the march included the Italian Communist Party. The friars who walked beside him have answered the insinuation plainly. “He is not a politician but a pastor,” says Father Giuseppe Pagano, who has known the pope since that day.

Peru tested the conviction. Prevost arrived in 1985, as Sendero Luminoso’s terror spread through the north of the country that made him.

In Elise Ann Allen’s biography of the pope, Leo remembers a bomb placed at the door of the bishop’s house in Chulucanas, and three priests assassinated in the diocese of Chimbote, south of Trujillo. The peaceful marches of those years stayed with him as well — Catholics organized them, he says, “to protest against terrorism and to say, ‘We’re not going to run, and we are going to promote peace and look for other ways of solving problems that are not the choice of terrorism.’”

He also names his teacher. “I remember Gandhi and reading some of his stuff on a peaceful protest to promote the good of the people and not to use violence, but to authentically preach a message of peace and dialogue,” the pope told Allen, recalling his refusal of the armed currents then running through Peruvian church circles. “That was something that made a lot more sense to me.”

His seminarians in Trujillo marched under a sign reading “If you want peace, work for justice.” When Peruvian soldiers boarded a minibus in the mid-1990s to conscript those same young men into the army, the New York Times reported last year, Prevost stood up to them: “No, these young men are going to be priests; they cannot go to the barracks.” A seminarian who was on that bus, Father Ramiro Castillo, remembered it simply: “When he had to speak, he spoke.”

Offered a bodyguard amid death threats, Prevost declined — “I don’t think I want a bodyguard; it makes it too obvious who you are.” His own summary of those years, preserved in Allen’s pages, runs three words: “But we stayed.”

The Church against the bomb

When Leo tells Trump that “the Church has spoken for years against all nuclear weapons,” he is citing the record. John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris, at the height of the Cold War in 1963, that “nuclear weapons must be banned.” Two years later, Paul VI carried the plea to the United Nations floor: “Never again war!” The warning about war as “an adventure with no return” that Leo quotes in today’s foreword comes from John Paul II.

And it was Francis who flew to Hiroshima in 2019 to declare the use and the possession of atomic weapons alike “immoral,” under whose authority the Holy See became one of the first states to ratify the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I wrote last August about how Leo carried that inheritance to the Hiroshima anniversary as the first American pope.

Today’s foreword compresses the whole tradition into one sentence — deterrence has the logic of peace backward, because “it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament.”

The man Burch says holds “a set of limited facts” refused a bodyguard during a terror campaign, faced down soldiers to protect his seminarians, and has been preaching nonviolence since the Reagan administration. He asks in today’s book whether the human species may continue to inhabit the Earth. The government of his native country answers with another night of airstrikes and a press release calling it peace.

“It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.” The pope wrote that line for all of us.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics — joined by countless people of goodwill — who believe that human beings were not made to live under the shadow of their own extinction, and that a government which signs a peace at Versailles and breaks it within a month owes the world more than slogans.

We are the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for moral clarity about war — for reporting that takes the Gospel seriously enough to test power against it, and for a faith that refuses to bow before the idols of fear and the bomb.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a war machine that calls itself peace — 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 members receive our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation — including the Peru years that shaped the pope you met in this essay — along with the Epstein-Bannon investigation and Pope Leo Takes On AI.

And you can go deeper into the three books behind today’s reporting with our essays on Elise Ann Allen’s historic biography, Christopher Lamb’s revelatory portrait, and the inside story of the conclave that elected him.

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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Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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“Beauty,” Pope Leo XIV told a crowd gathered for a Saturday evening concert in the courtyard of the Apostolic Palace at Castel Gandolfo, “helps us to see and to lift our gaze toward heaven.”

The line was a callback to his own itinerary. The pope flew to Barcelona in June to bless the final tower of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família a century after the architect’s death, and on Saturday he reminded his listeners that the whole purpose of that Spanish journey “was to lift our eyes, our gaze, toward heaven.”

The gaze goes back much further than Spain.

One year ago tonight, Pope Leo XIV ended a quiet Sunday at Castel Gandolfo by getting on Zoom with Buzz Aldrin.

The astronaut was 95 years old, the pope 69. According to the Holy See Press Office, the two men shared “the memory of a historic achievement” and, using the words of Psalm 8, reflected together “on the mystery of Creation, its greatness, and its fragility.”

“Anca and I were grateful and touched to receive the highest blessing from His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV on the 56th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing,” Aldrin wrote afterward. “What an honor!”

Earlier that afternoon, Leo had climbed into the domes of the Vatican Observatory above the papal villa to look over its telescopes. He ended up staying at Castel Gandolfo two days longer than planned.

Today marks fifty-seven years since the Eagle settled onto the Sea of Tranquility. On that July night in 1969, Robert Francis Prevost was a thirteen-year-old in Dolton, Illinois — a boy whose gift for numbers would eventually carry him through a mathematics degree at Villanova.

Another pope stood on the Castel Gandolfo hilltop that first night. Paul VI spent the evening of July 20, 1969, moving between a telescope at the Vatican Observatory and a television tuned to the landing. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface, the 71-year-old pope applauded.

Then he sent the crew a message of his own: “Honor, greetings and blessings to you, conquerors of the moon, pale lamp of our nights and our dreams!”

Paul VI had also sent something ahead of them. NASA had gathered goodwill messages from the leaders of 73 countries, etched them onto a silicon disc about the size of a half dollar, and packed the disc aboard the lunar module. The pope’s contribution was Psalm 8: “When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place — what is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him?”

The Apollo 11 crew left that disc in the lunar dust at Tranquility Base. The psalm Leo XIV prayed with Buzz Aldrin last summer has been lying on the moon for fifty-seven years.

Aldrin brought his own liturgy along, too. An elder at Webster Presbyterian Church outside Houston, he quietly took communion inside the lunar module after touchdown, using bread and a tiny chalice of wine his congregation had given him — the first food and drink any human consumed on the moon.

That October, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins came with their wives to the papal library for an audience with Paul VI. A piece of the lunar surface later given to the Vatican remains at Castel Gandolfo to this day.

When an oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13 in April 1970, Paul VI prayed publicly for “those daring men, now in danger” — and once the crew splashed down safely, he cabled President Nixon his “profound gratitude to God, to men of science, and to all who contributed to make this possible.”

The Wound and the Long Repair

The Church did not always greet the heavens this warmly. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo Galilei for defending the claim that the earth moves around the sun, forced the old astronomer to abjure it, and confined him to his villa for the rest of his life. That trial has shadowed every conversation between faith and science since.

John Paul II refused to leave the shadow unexamined. He established a commission in 1981 to reopen the Galileo file, and on October 31, 1992, he received its findings before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, describing the affair as a “tragic mutual incomprehension” and acknowledging that the theologians of Galileo’s day had wrongly read a cosmology out of the literal sense of scripture.

The repair was credible because the Church had never actually stopped doing astronomy. Gregory XIII set astronomers to work in a tower above the Vatican so that the calendar he promulgated in 1582 — and with it the date of Easter — would match the actual sky. Leo XIII refounded the Vatican Observatory in 1891 with the motu proprio Ut mysticam, declaring that he wanted everyone to see clearly that the Church and her pastors are “not opposed to true and solid science.”

Pius XI moved the telescopes out to Castel Gandolfo in the 1930s after Rome’s electric lights washed out the night sky, and the Jesuits of the Specola Vaticana now operate a major research telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona.

The priesthood has produced working cosmologists all along. Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cleric and physicist, first proposed the expanding universe that the world now calls the Big Bang. Brother Guy Consolmagno, an MIT-trained Jesuit planetary scientist, directed the observatory for a decade until Leo XIV handed it to Father Richard D’Souza, an Indian Jesuit astronomer, in 2025.

Calls to the Heavens

Eventually the popes followed the astronauts into their own medium. On May 21, 2011, Benedict XVI became the first pope to speak with a crew in orbit, a satellite link connecting the Vatican Library to twelve astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the shuttle Endeavour.

He asked whether they found time to pray. Turning to Mark Kelly — whose wife, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was still recovering from an assassination attempt — the pope wondered aloud what humanity’s conflicts look like from up there, and Kelly answered that no borders are visible from the station. Benedict called spaceflight “an adventure of the human spirit.”

Francis made his own call on October 26, 2017, questioning the six-man crew of Expedition 53 for twenty-three minutes about joy, love, and humanity’s place in the cosmos, with the Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli translating. Asked about Dante’s vision of the love that moves the sun and the other stars, a Russian cosmonaut reached instead for The Little Prince.

What Is Man?

Run the thread back through all of it, and you keep finding Psalm 8. The psalm asks the question that every technological triumph forces on humanity again: what is man? A species that can leave bootprints on another world can also build systems that treat human beings as raw material, and the century that produced Apollo produced plenty of those.

The Church keeps astronomers on staff because wonder is a moral discipline. Anyone who has honestly looked at the moon and stars — the work, as the psalmist says, of God’s fingers — will struggle to treat a creature made little less than the angels as disposable.

Leo XIV inherited this tradition knowingly. His namesake built the observatory he toured last July.

This May, he told the Vatican Observatory Foundation’s board that “the hunger to understand creation more fully is nothing less than a reflection of that restless longing for God which lies at the heart of every soul.”

The mathematician-pope who wrote Magnifica Humanitas to insist that artificial intelligence serve the human person is working the same seam Leo XIII opened in 1891 — a Church confident enough in God to love whatever the telescope reveals.

Tonight the moon will rise over Castel Gandolfo just as it rose for Paul VI, and somewhere in the Sea of Tranquility a psalm lies in the dust where the astronauts left it. No one will ever read it there. That was never the point. Prayer goes outward on the confidence that someone is listening, and after fifty-seven years the Church is still praying this one — while the man who carried it to the moon carries the blessing of the first American pope.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with everyone who still looks up: scientists and psalmists, Jesuit brothers at their telescopes, grandmothers at their novenas, and a pope who believes that wonder before creation and reverence for the human person are a single movement of the soul.

In an era when the powerful treat the heavens and their neighbors alike as territory to seize, this community bears witness that creation is a gift — and that every man and woman under this moon carries a dignity no government, no algorithm, and no market can revoke.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill defending human dignity in an age that keeps forgetting the question Psalm 8 asks — I am asking you to join us.

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

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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops confronted the Trump administration again on Monday, releasing a pastoral reflection on the immigration enforcement killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

“Acts that diminish or disregard the dignity of any person or group of people should never be normalized in our society,” wrote Bishop Daniel E. Garcia of Monterey, chairman of the bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion of Racial Justice and Reconciliation, and Bishop Brendan J. Cahill of Victoria, Texas, who leads the Committee on Migration.

An ICE agent shot Salgado, a 52-year-old construction worker, on July 7 as he drove his crew to a Houston job site. Durán, 25, held federal work authorization and was raising a 3-year-old daughter when an officer fired into his car in Biddeford six days later. Neither man was the target of the operation that killed him.

Salgado had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years and raised three children, every one of them an American citizen. Durán came from Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2023 and received federal work authorization in March 2025. Both men were Catholic; their families now grieve inside the household of faith.

The chairmen named the machinery behind the deaths. “Racial profiling in particular not only violates God-given dignity but also inflicts profound harm on individuals, families, and communities by fostering fear, eroding trust, and increasing the risk of unjust and even tragic outcomes,” they wrote, adding that the bishops’ pastoral concerns “are distinct from what the civil law itself may permit.”

The phrase “God-given dignity” carries a footnote, and the footnote tells the deeper story.

It points to page four of Open Wide Our Hearts, the pastoral letter against racism that the full body of bishops approved in November 2018 — their first in thirty-nine years. The letter took shape after the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, in the same year the first Trump administration separated thousands of children from their parents at the southern border.

Its warnings read today like prophecy. “Racial profiling frequently targets Hispanics for selective immigration enforcement practices,” the bishops wrote eight years ago, condemning the “extreme nationalist ideologies” that were “feeding the American public discourse with xenophobic rhetoric that instigates fear against foreigners, immigrants, and refugees.”

“Hispanics are the major target of immigration raids and mass deportation. In the past, U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent caught up in these raids have been deported. Today, many Hispanics are often assumed to be in this country illegally. These attitudes of cultural superiority, indifference, and racism need to be confronted; they are unworthy of any follower of Christ.”

The letter reaches back to Genesis for its diagnosis. “Racism shares in the same evil that moved Cain to kill his brother,” the bishops taught — the refusal to recognize the image of God in the man standing in front of you. In Houston and in Biddeford this month, that refusal held a service weapon.

The 2018 letter turns its confession inward, onto the church itself. Too often, the bishops admitted, racism “comes in the form of the sin of omission, when individuals, communities, and even churches remain silent and fail to act against racial injustice when it is encountered.”

Even the title is a summons. The bishops borrowed it from St. Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia heiress who gave her fortune to build schools for Black and Native American children after Pope Leo XIII — the pope of Rerum Novarum, whose name Leo XIV took as his own — pointed her toward mission work in 1887: “Let us open wide our hearts. It is joy which invites us. Press forward and fear nothing.”

Monday’s reflection also reaffirms the Special Message on immigration the bishops adopted at their Baltimore assembly last November — a form of collective teaching the conference had not used in twelve years. Conference rules demand a two-thirds majority before the bishops may speak this way; they cleared that bar with room to spare, 216 to 5 with three abstentions, and the vote closed to sustained applause on the assembly floor.

“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” the bishops declared then. “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”

The next morning, the conference carried that message onto social media in a video that traveled around the world.

Pope Leo XIV asked for exactly this. Last fall, the first American pope told a delegation led by El Paso’s Bishop Mark Seitz that the church “cannot be silent” about the suffering of immigrants.

The November message drew his public blessing — “a very important statement,” he called it, inviting “especially all Catholics, but people of goodwill, to listen carefully to what they said” — and he has condemned this administration’s treatment of longtime residents as “extremely disrespectful.” On America’s 250th birthday, he stood on Lampedusa and wrote to his own country that defending human life means “welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants.”

I wrote yesterday about the two churches that answered these killings — one in Texas, one in Maine. Archbishop Joe S. Vásquez of Galveston-Houston named Lorenzo Salgado in public, prayed for his family, and placed the bishops’ standard on the record: enforcement must be “targeted, proportional, and humane.”

The Diocese of Portland issued a statement that never mentioned ICE, and though the diocese’s news page has since reposted the bishops’ November message and Monday’s reflection, Bishop James Ruggieri has still not said a public word of his own.

Monday’s reflection closes that gap from Washington. The conference demanded “accountability, transparency, and justice” where Portland’s chancery offered condolences alone, and its opening confession — that all persons “are created in the image and likeness of God” — echoes almost word for word what Vásquez told Houston on July 15. A bishop in Maine who could not find the language now has it written for him.

The chairmen refused to bless dehumanization in any direction, pairing their defense of immigrants with a condemnation of “the vilification of law enforcement officers.” The administration has offered nothing comparable in return.

Since November, the White House has rejected the bishops’ plea to pause raids over Christmas, and the conference has carried its defense of immigrant dignity to the Supreme Court.

Monday’s statement extends a confrontation between the Catholic Church and Donald Trump that has now run the length of his second term. A conference that once weighed every syllable about this White House today cites its own letter against racism to describe the government’s enforcement campaign. Pope Leo XIV asked the American bishops for vigilance, and the American bishops are beginning to supply it.

The bishops ended the argument of their 2018 letter with a plain sentence: “People are still being harmed, so action is still needed.” Eight years later, the harm carries two names — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — and a church that once confessed the sin of its own silence is refusing to repeat it.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Garcia and Bishop Cahill, with the families of Lorenzo Salgado and Johan Durán, and with every immigrant family spending this summer afraid of a knock at the door.

The bishops confessed in Open Wide Our Hearts that even churches can sin by omission — by staying quiet while injustice unfolds on their doorstep. This community exists to refuse that omission, in season and out.

This has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that names what it sees — the dignity of two Catholic workingmen, the grief of their children, and the moral law that binds even the powerful.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an enforcement machine that profiles, terrorizes, and kills — I am asking you to join us.

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

• 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 members receive our exclusive investigations — including the Epstein-Bannon Investigation — and the ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the story of how a missionary from Chicago became a pope who defends the stranger, along with Pope Leo Takes On AI and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving his construction crew to a job site in Houston on the morning of July 7 when an ICE agent shot him.

Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left home for the first of his two jobs. He never made it — an ICE officer fired on his car that morning.

Neither man was the target of the operation that killed him.

Salgado died on July 7, Durán on July 13 — and on July 11, between the two killings, the United States began striking Iran once again.

Since then, the war Pope Leo XIV has opposed from its first hours has swallowed the news cycle whole — the naval blockade, the tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, some 140 military sites hit in a single night. That attention is understandable — two American service members were killed in Jordan on Friday, the war’s first deaths from Iranian fire since March — and grief for the fallen deserves its place on every front page. A country mourning its soldiers can still refuse to forget two workingmen shot on their way to work. The Church must insist on it.

What happened in Houston

Salgado was 52 years old, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years. He built homes for a living and raised three children, all of them American citizens. His brother sat beside him in the car when ICE agents moved to stop the vehicle as part of a targeted enforcement operation aimed at someone else entirely.

ICE claims Salgado rammed an enforcement vehicle and tried to run over an agent. The men who were feet away — his brother and two coworkers among them — say he did nothing of the kind. There is no body-camera or dash-camera footage of the stop — acting ICE Director David Venturella conceded as much to Rep. Sylvia Garcia by phone.

Salgado’s oldest son, Ronaldo, learned of the shooting when he recognized his father’s voice crying for help in a video posted to social media. “He was close to obtaining his legal status,” he told reporters the next day.

What happened in Biddeford

Durán was 25, a Colombian from Bucaramanga. He crossed the southern border in September 2023, received federal work authorization in March 2025, held two jobs, and was raising a 3-year-old daughter with his partner.

On the morning of July 13, ICE officers were surveilling the last known address of another man — someone under a final order of removal — when Durán drove away from the building. Officers moved to stop his car. The government says the vehicle “attempted to flee” and that an officer fired “fearing for public safety.” The officer was newly sworn in. No body-camera footage of the shooting exists — DHS says the officers wore none, though The Intercept reports that agents at the scene carried camera-equipped devices the agency never activates.

Reporters have since identified the officer, though ICE will neither confirm nor deny it: David Brouillette, an Army veteran and former Maine law enforcement officer. His first ex-wife told NPR that he shot Durán four times, that their marriage was violent, and that she once offered the Maine National Guard paperwork she says documented his diagnoses of bipolar disorder and borderline schizophrenia — and was brushed off. A 2021 court filing by his second ex-wife, who accused him of abusing their teenage daughter, temporarily stripped him of his firearms, and NPR obtained a voicemail he left last November — while under a restraining order — saying the women in his ex-wife’s family should have their throats cut. ICE’s answer to all of it: the officer has “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”

The Guardian had already counted at least 10 people shot dead by immigration agents since Donald Trump returned to office. Durán made 11. Hundreds marched in Biddeford and Portland the following day, and the Department of Homeland Security has since ordered a temporary halt to ICE vehicle stops — a bureaucratic admission that something is deeply wrong, and one that border czar Tom Homan publicly walked back within days. A GoFundMe for Durán’s partner and daughter, and for the return of his body to Colombia, has raised nearly $500,000.

Two churches, two answers

The Church in Texas met the moment. Archbishop Joe S. Vásquez of Galveston-Houston issued a statement naming Lorenzo Salgado, calling the faithful to pray for his family “and all those affected by fear and anxiety,” and placing the American bishops’ indictment of this enforcement regime on the record: enforcement must be “targeted, proportional, and humane,” and an “enforcement-only approach” cannot deliver justice.

Vásquez does not stand alone in Texas. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ migration committee, has called the mass deportation campaign “a grave moral evil” and compared it to a Category 4 hurricane tearing through immigrant communities.

Maine’s answer reads differently. The Diocese of Portland released a brief statement on July 15 through its Office of Hispanic Ministry, promising pastoral support and praying that “all those affected by his death may experience God’s loving comfort, strength, and peace.”

The statement never mentions ICE. Nowhere does it name the agency that killed Durán or ask for an investigation, and it carries no signature from Bishop James Ruggieri, who as of this writing has released nothing public of his own. The diocese never shared the statement on its own social media accounts, which have carried on since July 13 with feast-day tributes and event flyers.

Catholic Charities Maine offered condolences alongside its “trust that a fair and transparent investigation will be conducted” and its regard for “the tremendous responsibility” of federal law enforcement.

A young father in the diocese was shot dead by an agent of the state, and the institutional Church in Maine responded as though he had died in a storm. Prayer is where a bishop begins. When prayer arrives without truth, the flock hears the silence underneath it.

The pope has already told us what to do

Pope Leo XIV has left no room for this timidity.

On July 4 — the nation’s 250th birthday — the first American pope went to Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island where thousands of migrants have drowned, and released a letter to his own country declaring that the protection of human life means “welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants.” He has warned that history will judge harshly the leaders who mistreat them. Last fall he told Seitz that the church “cannot be silent” on the plight of immigrants.

The Church in this country already knows how indiscriminate the machine has become. Late last month, ICE officers handcuffed Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Nigerian-born nun and registered nurse, as she walked to Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas. They took her rosary. She was released only after members of Congress from both parties intervened.

I have argued in these pages that every Catholic must resign from ICE — today, without waiting for permission. The bishops are circling the same conclusion. Seitz has warned that the moment is nearing when Catholic agents must say, “In conscience, I can’t do this.” Bishop Mark Brennan, the former bishop of Wheeling, invoked Nuremberg to remind agents that no one escapes moral responsibility by pleading “I was just following orders.”

An agency that shoots men on their way to work, handcuffs a nun on her way to the Eucharist, and sends its officers into the streets without cameras has forfeited any Catholic’s good-faith service. The men and women inside it who share our faith now face a question older than this republic: whom do you serve?

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were our brothers, and their families now grieve inside the household of faith. Cardinal Dolan — no liberal by any stretch of the imagination — reminded the country this week that we are a nation of immigrants, and the pope has told us plainly what receiving the stranger requires.

The war will keep the cameras pointed at the Strait of Hormuz. Our eyes belong on Houston and Biddeford — on a 3-year-old girl in Maine who will grow up without her father, and on three grown children in Texas burying theirs. These killings must wake the Church from its distraction. Evil does not pause because another evil is louder.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the families of Lorenzo Salgado and Johan Durán, with the pastors and bishops who refuse to whisper, and with every immigrant spending this summer afraid of a knock at the door.

We believe what the Church has always taught: every human being carries the image of God, and a government that treats his children as prey will answer to him.

This has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth out loud — about a war, about two dead workingmen, and about a Church that must choose witness over caution.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a machine that kills the innocent and dares us to look away — I am asking you to join us.

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

• 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 members receive our exclusive investigations — including the Epstein-Bannon Investigation — and the ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the story of how a missionary from Chicago became a pope who defends the stranger, along with Pope Leo Takes On AI and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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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Dear friends,

Letters from Leo’s Sunday Reflection Series are essays grounded in the Mass readings — offering a clear-eyed way to follow Jesus amid today’s political realities, not by retreating from public life or baptizing any ideology, but by letting the Gospel shape our conscience, courage, and compassion.

These reflections will be available to all paid subscribers, as a small but sincere way of saying thank you for making Letters from Leo possible.

Letters from Leo is open to anyone who wants to be informed and inspired by our pope — and to turn that inspiration into action that leaves America and the world more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.

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, $1, $100, $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

“Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the kingdom.” — Cf. Matthew 11:25

Most parishes in America skip this verse. The lectionary sets it between the second reading and the Gospel, a single line meant to be sung inside the alleluia, and most cantors let the melody run on without it.

Liturgists call it the Gospel acclamation. Almost nobody notices it at all. Today the forgotten line happens to be the key that unlocks everything after it: “Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the kingdom.”

Hold that verse in your hand as you listen to the parable. A farmer sows good seed in his field. While everyone sleeps, an enemy scatters weeds through the wheat and slips away. When the crop comes up, the sabotage comes up with it. The farmhands want it fixed immediately and by force.

The owner tells them no: “If you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest.”

Last Sunday we watched this same farmer fling seed onto footpaths and rock shelves, and I argued that his recklessness is the point — nobody gets skipped.

This week Matthew paints the other half of the portrait. The God who sows without testing the soil also declines to weed. He plants among the thistles. His field will not be cleaned up ahead of the harvest, and he seems strangely at peace about that.

Look at what the parable refuses to say about the weeds. Jesus never suggests God created them. When the servants ask where they came from, the owner answers in four words, “An enemy has done this,” and in his private explanation to the disciples he names that enemy as the devil.

The weed in question was almost certainly darnel, a grass so similar to young wheat that the two cannot be told apart until the heads form. The rabbis called it zunin and treated it as wheat gone astray, grain that had abandoned its own nature. This is an important lesson. Evil is oftentimes adjacent to the good.

God allows what he does not create. Here’s what I mean.

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Peter Thiel has a new suspect.

Having already name-checked Pope Leo XIV, Pope Francis, and the climate activist Greta Thunberg for the dishonor, the Palantir co-founder has now settled on a Swiss theologian who died five years ago.

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Cardinal Timothy Dolan looked into a camera on Tuesday morning and celebrated…

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On the evening of July 4, as fireworks lit the American sky and politicians traded tributes to the republic’s founding, Archbishop Der…

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On Monday afternoon in Rome, Vatican News published an editorial by Andrea Tornielli, the editorial director of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Communication and arguably the man most responsible for how Pope Leo XIV’s message reaches the world. The piece carries a title that doubles as a thesis: “The Pope always speaks as a Shepherd.”

“Even when he speaks about war and peace, migration or how to remain human in the age of artificial intelligence,” Tornielli writes, “the Successor of Peter remains, above all, a spiritual leader.”

No American official is named anywhere in the editorial. Four days earlier, though, The New York Times published a lengthy interview with Brian Burch, the United States ambassador to the Holy See — and once you have read it, Tornielli’s essay is unmistakable as a point-by-point answer.

Burch told the Times that the months-long clash between President Trump and Pope Leo over the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran rests on a narrative he considers “false” and “entirely unfair.” He also insisted the pope has never actually declared the war unjust. “The Vatican has not said, nor will they say, declare definitively whether or not this is a just or unjust war,” the ambassador said during a 90-minute conversation at his office in Rome in late June.

Pope Leo settled that question weeks earlier aboard the papal plane. “I believe this has already been made very clear: In Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present,” he told reporters on his June flight to Spain.

How does an ambassador square that circle? Burch’s answer holds that a definitive judgment lies beyond the pope’s reach, because Leo possesses only “a set of limited facts.”

In a companion interview with the Italian daily La Stampa, published two days before the Times piece ran, he laid out the theory underneath: “the Holy Father plays two roles,” he said — head of the Catholic Church and head of the Holy See, “a sovereign leader who interacts with the world as such.”

Follow that logic to its end, and the destination is remarkable.

When Leo condemns the war in Iran, the words issue from the sovereign of a half-square-kilometer city-state — one foreign government’s foreign policy, in effect — rather than from the successor of Peter teaching Christ’s Church.

The moral verdict becomes “the opinion of the Vatican” only because the Vatican happens to be a state, as if the American government could weigh the pope’s words the way it weighs a communiqué from San Marino, Monaco, or Luxembourg. Opinions like that can be waved away.

Rome has noticed. Gerry O’Connell, America’s veteran Vatican correspondent, reported Monday that a senior church prelate with diplomatic experience responded this way soon after the interview published:

“I think the ambassador doesn’t realize exactly to whom he has been accredited. He should know that the pope is never ‘only the sovereign political leader of the Vatican City State’ and that diplomats are accredited to the Holy See and not to the Vatican City State.”

Tornielli devoted his editorial to dismantling that theory. The Holy See’s temporal sovereignty exists for one purpose, he explains: Paul VI, standing before the United Nations in 1965, called it “the minimum needed in order to be free to exercise his spiritual mission.” And the papacy grew stronger in its moral influence, Tornielli notes, after it lost the Papal States in 1870 — freed from earthly kingdoms, it could finally speak to all of them.

Then comes the sentence written, however discreetly, for the ambassador’s residence: “Any glorification or exaggeration of the Pope’s role as head of state, any emphasis on the importance of this role, is therefore misleading because it comes at the expense of his one true mission as universal Shepherd.”

And when the pope pleads for an end to what Tornielli calls “the mad arms race” — “even going beyond the concept of a ‘just war’” — the editorial’s closing line leaves no room for a diplomat’s reframing: “the Successor of Peter is not speaking as a head of state. He is simply proclaiming the Gospel.”

The administration has run this maneuver before.

In January, after Pope Leo used his Angelus address to insist that Venezuela’s sovereignty be safeguarded amid the American military campaign there, Burch downplayed the pope’s call for peace and suggested his words were compatible with — even supportive of — the American intervention. The sovereignty warning vanished from his account entirely.

I covered that episode in detail at the time, and the pattern it established is the one Tornielli confronted this week: when the pope’s words cut against Washington’s policy, reframe the words.

Which makes the evening of July 4 all the more striking. Five days before the Times interview appeared, Pope Leo — having returned that same day from Lampedusa, where he spent America’s 250th birthday with migrants who survived the sea crossing — came to dinner at Burch’s villa in Rome. He blessed religious objects for the family, ate Chicago-style hot dogs and watermelon salad, signed baseballs dated 7-4-26, and stayed through sparklers and “God Bless America.”

It matters that Leo took that meeting. Anyone who has read the four extraordinary books on this pope — Elise Ann Allen’s Pope Leo XIV: The Biography, Christopher Lamb’s American Hope, Christopher White’s Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy, and Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué’s The Election of Pope Leo XIV — will recognize the pattern of a lifetime: Robert Prevost listens to everyone, and he does not slam doors, even doors held open by an administration whose policies he has condemned.

Now for the part of this essay I have been circling. Writing about Brian Burch is complicated for me, because Brian Burch has been my friend for years — through every fight in Catholic politics that should have made us enemies. Let me give you some background on why that is, and why I am writing this anyway.

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Dear friends,

Letters from Leo’s Sunday Reflection Series are essays grounded in the Mass readings — offering a clear-eyed way to follow Jesus amid today’s political realities, not by retreating from public life or baptizing any ideology, but by letting the Gospel shape our conscience, courage, and compassion.

These reflections will be available to all paid subscribers, as a small but sincere way of saying thank you for making Letters from Leo possible.

Letters from Leo is open to anyone who wants to be informed and inspired by our pope — and to turn that inspiration into action that leaves America and the world more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.

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, $1, $100, $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.

Subscribe now

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Today’s Readings

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up.” — Matthew 13:3-4

There is a farmer in today’s Gospel who throws seed onto a footpath. Watch him work for a moment. He flings grain across packed dirt where travelers walk, onto shelves of rock, into standing thornbushes, and he keeps his rhythm the whole time, as if the waste never crosses his mind.

Any farmer in Galilee would have winced at the sight. Seed was capital. A careful man measured his grain and buried it only where the ground gave him decent odds.

Most of us have heard this parable turned into an examination of conscience.

What kind of soil am I? Is my heart the path, the rocks, the thorns, or the good earth? Preachers reach for that reading almost by instinct, and Jesus himself walks the disciples through the four soils, so the question is legitimate.

But Jesus named this story for the sower, and the sower deserves far more of our attention than we usually give him.

Look at what the farmer’s behavior tells us about God. He sows without circumspection. He never tests the soil or weighs the odds. The same handful of seed falls on the pavement and the good field alike, which means the gift is open to every heart in every condition — distracted, shallow, choked with worry, or ready. Nobody gets skipped.

Then come the results.

Historians of ancient agriculture estimate that a good harvest in first-century Galilee returned roughly sevenfold on the seed a farmer buried. Scripture treats anything beyond that as a wonder: when Isaac reaped a hundredfold, Genesis explains the marvel in four words — “the Lord blessed him.”

Jesus closes his story with thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold as the ordinary output of God’s word in a willing heart. We are dealing with a lavish giver whose returns no field on earth can match.

What does that mean for us?

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Pope Leo XIV told 200 of Rome’s poor on Saturday that he had come to their table hungry — for justice, for genuine charity,…

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I want my rooting interest on the record from the first sentence: I am an American, I wanted the United States to beat Belgium ear…

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Pope Leo XIV will celebrate Mass with roughly 200 poor and vulnerable residents of the Diocese of Rome this Saturday in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo — and when the liturgy en…

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