Month: June 2025

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – Pope Leo XIV, as the first U.S.-born pope, may bring unique insight to the problem of polarization in the U.S. and in the U.S. church, analysts told OSV News.

“From what I’ve heard, Rome always has an eye on the U.S. church, but that doesn’t mean that what is going on in the United States is going to shape the ways Pope Leo leads the global church. However, he is going to be more intimately aware of what is happening in the United States and more attuned to the cultural subtleties than previous popes have been,” Maureen Day, a research affiliate at the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture and that university’s Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, told OSV News.

Multiple recent academic studies show evidence of growing partisanship and polarization in the U.S. A New York Times analysis even found these trends apparent in moving patterns of Americans who relocate to other neighborhoods, towns or states.

Catholic leaders, including the U.S. bishops, have also observed these trends in the U.S. church.

Father William Dailey, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, lecturer in law at Notre Dame Law School, and St. Thomas More Fellow of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, told OSV News the new pontiff “already (has) me thinking less about what divides and more about what does and must unite us.”

Father Dailey cautioned against looking at Leo’s pontificate through an inward lens, and to remember he is the leader of a global church.

“Anyone who comes from a particular culture stands a decent shot at understanding its nuances and particularities better than someone from outside, presumably,” he said. “So we might imagine that in working with the U.S. bishops and in appointing them he’ll have a better than usual sense of our challenges and how he might hope to offer guidance. He also brings a better sense of the global church to that conversation than many of us here would, which might help complement his insights about the U.S. church and what we might think are unique challenges or priorities for us but he might see as part of something larger.”

The political and social views of the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost were among the subjects some Catholics were eager to find clues to when he became pontiff. A review of a social media account previously used by the now-pope critical of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, but also posts critical of abortion and the death penalty, calls for a greater effort to address gun violence in the U.S., as well as prayers for healing and an end to racism after the murder of Minneapolis man George Floyd, whose death in police custody sparked unrest.

Both Father Dailey and Day suggested that in each of those subjects, the posts suggested an alignment with church teaching.

His posts “look like he puts his faith first and lets the politics fall into place,” Day said, while Father Dailey noted, “There’s very little in his tweeting in his own voice, as far as I can tell.”

“He retweeted articles that made basic points about the church being pro-life further in the past, and basic points about the church caring for immigrants and the poor more recently — these should not be polarizing among believing Catholics,” Father Dailey said of now-Pope Leo. “I imagine he agreed with the contents of the retweets, but I don’t see it as him wading into partisan politics then, and doubt he would do so now.”

Day added, “I think Pope Leo will be very clear on what the church teaches without ending conversations with those who see things differently. In a spirit of synodality, I think he will want to start a lot of conversations and make room for people to grow and surprise us.”

“He’s not going out of his way to excite one side or another,” Father Dailey said, arguing that Pope Leo’s early actions appear to be “about being Christ-centered.”

“So far, the tone that Leo has established has been interesting and calm,” he said. “Remember the great fanfare around Francis choosing a unique name and dressing a bit differently from his predecessors — it’s no criticism of those choices to note that people made a huge deal about them (some happy, some unhappy) whereas so far with Leo there’s a sense of his quietly surrendering himself into this unique and incomprehensibly demanding office — not without a vision but very much not making a splash.”

Day added that the late Pope Francis “was often dismissed by those who disagreed with him as simply not understanding the U.S. context,” and for some of those critics, when Pope Leo “weighs in on issues that are occuring within American public life,” they may see him more as a voice who carries “the weight of an insider.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Catholic Church, its ministers and its members must find new ways to reach out to and welcome families who are distant from the church and have no understanding of how much God loves them, Pope Leo XIV said.

Writing to 40 theologians and pastoral ministers participating in a seminar on evangelizing with families, the pope said the first goal of outreach is to help people longing for love and meaning to find that in Jesus.

“How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus — God who gives himself to us — with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life,” the pope wrote in a June 2 message.

The Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life gathered the experts at its Vatican office June 2-3 to reflect on the theme, “Evangelizing with the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges.” The seminar followed the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly.

Pope Leo told them, “This theme clearly expresses the church’s maternal concern for Christian families throughout the world as living members of the Mystical Body of Christ and the primary nucleus of the church, to whom the Lord entrusts the transmission of faith and the Gospel, especially to the new generations.”

Every human being, as St. Augustine taught, has a longing for God, the pope said. And parents have the first responsibility to respond to that longing by making their children “aware of the fatherhood of God.”

And while church attendance and formal religious affiliation in many places are declining, he said, “ours is a time marked by a growing search for spirituality, particularly evident in young people, who are longing for authentic relationships and guides in life.”

“Hence, it is important that the Christian community be farsighted in discerning the challenges of today’s world and in nurturing the desire for faith present in the heart of every man and woman,” he said.

But that, the pope said, requires paying special attention “to those families who, for various reasons, are spiritually most distant from us: those who do not feel involved, claim they are uninterested or feel excluded from the usual activities, yet would still like to be part of a community in which they can grow and journey together with others.”

“How many people today simply do not hear the invitation to encounter God?” Pope Leo asked.

Another problem, he said, is “an increasingly widespread ‘privatization’ of faith” so focused on the individual that newcomers have no experience of “the richness and gifts of the church, a place of grace, fraternity and love.”

“What drives the church in her pastoral and missionary outreach is precisely the desire to go out as a ‘fisher’ of humanity, in order to save it from the waters of evil and death through an encounter with Christ,” the pope said.

As an example, he pointed to young people who choose cohabitation instead of Christian marriage. What they need, he said, is “someone to show them in a concrete and clear way, especially by the example of their lives, what the gift of sacramental grace is and what strength derives from it. Someone to help them understand ‘the beauty and grandeur of the vocation to love and the service of life’ that God gives to married couples.”

When reaching out to families who are distant from the church, he said, patience and even creativity are needed.

“It is not a matter of giving hasty answers to difficult questions, but of drawing close to people, listening to them and trying to understand together with them how to face their difficulties.” Pope Leo said. “And this requires a readiness to be open, when necessary, to new ways of seeing things and different ways of acting, for each generation is different and has its own challenges, dreams and questions.”

The bishops have the first responsibility “to cast their nets into the sea and become ‘fishers of families,'” the pope said.

But it is a duty all Catholics share since “through baptism, each one of us has been made a priest, king and prophet for our brothers and sisters, and a ‘living stone’ for the building up of God’s house ‘in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity,'” he added, quoting from the homily at the inauguration of his papacy May 18.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Families are the cradle of the future of humanity, Pope Leo XIV said during a Mass concluding the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly.

“Today’s world needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat, thanks to its unifying and reconciling power, the forces that break down relationships and societies,” he said in his homily at the Mass celebrated June 1 in St. Peter’s Square.

The day also marked World Communications Day, and in remarks after the Mass Pope Leo thanked all “media workers who, by taking care of the ethical quality of messages, help families in their role as educators.”

In the family, he said in his homily, faith “is shared like food at the family table and like the love in our hearts. In this way, families become privileged places in which to encounter Jesus, who loves us and desires our good, always.”

Speaking to all married couples, the pope said that “marriage is not an ideal but the measure of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful,” and enables them, “in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life.”

“I encourage you, then, to be examples of integrity to your children, acting as you want them to act, educating them in freedom through obedience, always seeing the good in them and finding ways to nurture it,” he told married couples.

“And you, dear children, show gratitude to your parents. To say, ‘thank you’ each day for the gift of life and for all that comes with it is the first way to honor your father and your mother,” Pope Leo said.

Speaking to grandparents and elderly people, he asked that they “watch over your loved ones with wisdom and compassion, and with the humility and patience that come with age.”

The pope focused his homily on “The Prayer of Jesus” in the day’s Gospel reading (John 17:20-26) in which Jesus prays to the Father that all of Christ’s disciples not only follow him but also seek to be in union with the Father.

He re-read portions of the Gospel to emphasize God’s plan of unity for all of humanity, particularly: “I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me.”

“Jesus is telling us that God loves us as he loves him. The Father does not love us any less than he loves his only-begotten Son. In other words, with an infinite love,” Pope Leo said.

“In his mercy, God has always desired to draw all people to himself. It is his life, bestowed upon us in Christ, that makes us one, uniting us with one another,” he said, connecting the Gospel reflection to how it relates to celebrating the Jubilee of families.

Jesus’ prayer “makes fully meaningful our experience of love for one another as parents, grandparents, sons and daughters,” he said.

“That is what we want to proclaim to the world: We are here in order to be ‘one’ as the Lord wants us to be ‘one,’ in our families and in those places where we live, work and study. Different, yet one; many, yet one; always, in every situation and at every stage of life,” the pope said.

“If we love one another in this way, grounded in Christ,” he said, “we will be a sign of peace for everyone in society and the world. Let us not forget: Families are the cradle of the future of humanity.”

By beatifying and canonizing married couples who gave exemplary witness of married life, such as Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin and the Blessed Ulma family — mother, father and seven small children — “the church tells us that today’s world needs the marriage covenant” in order to discover and embrace God’s love and to defeat that which breaks down relationships and communities, he said.

No one chose to be born, he said, but someone was there to offer care. “All of us are alive today thanks to a relationship, a free and freeing relationship of human kindness and mutual care.”

However, “that human kindness is sometimes betrayed. As for example, whenever freedom is invoked not to give life, but to take it away, not to help, but to hurt,” he said.

Nonetheless, the pope said, “even in the face of the evil that opposes and takes life, Jesus continues to pray to the Father for us. His prayer acts as a balm for our wounds; it speaks to us of forgiveness and reconciliation.”

More than 70,000 people from 131 countries gathered in the square after three days of jubilee events in Rome. Families of every age and size were present in the square; some were holding banners or flags, wearing matching hats or seeking shelter under umbrellas from the hot morning sun.

Pope Leo rode through the crowds before the start of Mass while temperatures were still in the high 70s. He broke from his usual blessing of infants and small children hoisted up to him when a young boy in the crowd held out his hand for a shake. The pope leaned far out from the popemobile to give him a “low five” to the cheers and fist pumps of the boy and his friends.

Before praying the “Regina Coeli” in the square, the pope prayed for all families, especially those “suffering due to war in the Middle East, in Ukraine and in other parts of the world. May the Mother of God help us to press forward together on the path of peace.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – As spring turned into summer, some 2,000 people closed the month of May with a rosary walk through the Vatican Gardens.

The temperature was still close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit at 8 p.m. May 31 when the pilgrims set off from behind St. Peter’s Basilica, led by Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, archpriest of the basilica.

At the top of the Vatican hill, at the ivy-covered replica of the grotto at Lourdes, France, they were joined by Pope Leo XIV.

The rosary walk, he said, brings together the most important aspects of the Jubilee Year: “praise, a journey, hope and, especially, faith pondered and demonstrated together.”

As they walked, the pilgrims recited the five joyful mysteries of the rosary — the Annunciation, the Visitation, the birth of Jesus, the Presentation and the finding of Jesus in the Temple — and listened to the Scripture passages that recount the events in the life of Mary and Jesus.

“Your steps have been marked by the Word of God, whose rhythm has marked your progress, your stops and starts, just as it did for the people of Israel in the desert on their way to the promised land,” the pope told the pilgrims.

The Christian life should be like that, too, Pope Leo said.

“Let us look, then, at our existence as a journey following Jesus, to be traveled, as we did tonight, together with Mary,” he said. “And let us ask the Lord to teach us to praise him every day with our life and our tongue, with our heart and our lips, with our voice and our conduct, avoiding dissonance: our speech in harmony with our lives, and our lips with our conscience.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – In a church and a world divided and fractured, priests are called to be witnesses of God’s love and forgiveness, which reconciles people and makes them one community, Pope Leo XIV told new priests.

Leading Christian communities not as “lords” but as stewards, “we will rebuild the credibility of a wounded church sent to a wounded humanity within a wounded creation,” he told the 11 men he was about to ordain to the priesthood May 31.

“It is not important to be perfect, but it is necessary to be credible,” the pope said in his homily at the Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The 11 men had been scheduled to be ordained May 10 by Pope Francis, but the ordination was pushed back when the pope died April 21.

Seven of the new priests studied at the Rome diocesan seminary while four of them attended the Rome Redemptoris Mater Seminary, which is run by the diocese and the Neocatechumenal Way.

Pope Leo told the men, who ranged in age from their late 20s to early 40s, “You bear witness to the fact that God has not grown weary of gathering his children, however diverse, and of constituting them into a dynamic unity.”

The ministry of a priest, like that of the pope and the bishops, is to gather all people in the church, the pope told them. “Make room for the faithful and for every creature to whom the Risen One is close and in whom he loves to visit us and amaze us.”

“The people of God are more numerous than we see,” he said. “Let us not define its boundaries.”

God will place many people in their paths, Pope Leo told the new priests. “To them consecrate yourselves, without separating yourselves from them, without isolating yourselves, without making the gift you have received some kind of privilege.”

An ordination obviously is a joyful occasion for the church, he said. But “the depth, breadth and even duration of the divine joy we now share is directly proportional to the bonds that exist and will grow between you ordinands and the people from whom you come, of which you remain a part and to which you are sent.”

While the identity of the ordained priest “depends on union with Christ the high and eternal priest,” the pope said, the church’s ordained ministers must recognize and encourage the exercise of the common priesthood of all believers that flows from baptism.

“We are the people of God,” he said. “The Second Vatican Council made this awareness more vivid, almost as if anticipating a time when a sense of belonging would become weaker and the sense of God more rarefied.”

Being part of the people of God and called to lead them, he said, means the priests always must try to be role models of Christian living with the transparency of their lives, “lives known, readable lives, credible lives!”

“We stand within God’s people, so that we can stand before them with a credible witness,” Pope Leo said.

Like the still-visible wounds of the risen Jesus, the flaws of individuals and the fractures within humanity are also signs that God’s love transforms everything and everyone, he said. “Everything that to our eyes seemed broken and lost now appears to us in the sign of reconciliation.”