Month: August 2025

ROME (CNS) – Addressing an estimated 1 million young people, Pope Leo XIV urged them to forge genuine relationships rooted in Christ rather than ephemeral online connections that can reduce individuals to a commodity.

“When a tool controls someone, that person becomes a tool: a commodity on the market and, in turn, a piece of merchandise,” the pope said during the evening prayer vigil for the Jubilee of Youth Aug. 2. “Only genuine relationships and stable connections can build good lives.”

The pope arrived by helicopter at the Tor Vergata field, roughly eight miles southeast of Rome’s city center, and was greeted with cheers from young people waving flags. Many of the youth were going to camp out overnight, sleeping in tents and sleeping bags on the dusty field, much like the World Youth Day celebration held 25 years ago in the same location.

Countless young people kicked up the dust from the field as they ran alongside the popemobile to catch a glimpse of the pontiff. Pope Leo smiled and waved at the youth, occasionally catching objects and plush toys that were hurled his way.

Exiting the popemobile, he was handed the large Jubilee year cross, which he carried to the main altar, accompanied by dozens of young people.

After beginning the vigil with prayers, the pope engaged in a dialogue with several young people who asked him three questions.

Dulce Maria, a 23-year-old woman from Mexico, spoke of the excitement of online friendships but also of the loneliness that comes from connections that are “not true and lasting relationships, but rather fleeting and often illusory.”

“How can we find true friendship and genuine love that will lead us to true hope? How can faith help us build our future?” she asked.

Pope Leo acknowledged the potential of the internet and social media as “an extraordinary opportunity for dialogue,” but warned that these tools “are misleading when they are controlled by commercialism and interests that fragment our relationships.”

Drawing from his Augustinian spirituality, Pope Leo urged young people to emulate St. Augustine, who had a “restless youth, but he did not settle for less.”

“How did he find true friendship and a love capable of giving hope? By finding the one who was already looking for him, Jesus Christ,” the pope said. “How did he build his future? By following the one who had always been his friend.”

Gaia, a 19-year-old woman from Italy, asked how young people can find the courage to make choices amid uncertainty.

“To choose is a fundamental human act,” the pope responded. “When we make a choice, in the strict sense, we decide who we want to become.”

He encouraged young people to remember they were chosen by God, and that “the courage to choose comes from love, which God shows us in Christ.”

The pope recalled St. John Paul II’s words spoken in the same place 25 years ago, reminding the youth that “it is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you.”

The pope called “radical and meaningful choices,” such as marriage, priesthood and religious life, “the free and liberating gift of self that makes us truly happy.”

“These choices give meaning to our lives, transforming them into the image of the perfect love that created them and redeemed them from all evil, even from death,” he said.

Departing from his prepared remarks, Pope Leo expressed condolences for the deaths of two pilgrims. Pascale Rafic, an 18-year-old pilgrim from Egypt, who died due to a heart condition. Earlier in the day, the pope met with a group of Egyptian youth with whom Rafic traveled to Rome.

Maria Cobo Vergara, a 20-year-old pilgrim from Madrid, Spain, died July 30. While the cause of death was not mentioned in a statement published Aug. 1, the Archdiocese of Madrid said the young pilgrim suffered “four years of illness.”

“Both (pilgrims) chose to come to Rome for the Jubilee of Youth, and death has taken them in these days,” the pope said at the vigil. “Let us pray together for them.”

Lastly, 20-year-old Will, a young pilgrim from the United States, asked the pope how to “truly encounter the Risen Lord in our lives and be sure of his presence even in the midst of trials and uncertainties.”

Recalling Pope Francis’ papal bull for the Holy Year 2025, “Spes non confundit” (“Hope Does Not Disappoint”), Pope Leo said that “hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come,” and that one’s understanding of good “reflects how our conscience has been shaped by the people in our lives.”

He urged them to foster their conscience by listening to Jesus’ word and to “reflect on your way of living, and seek justice in order to build a more humane world.”

“Serve the poor, and so bear witness to the good that we would always like to receive from our neighbors,” he said. “Adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, the source of eternal life. Study, work and love according to the example of Jesus, the good Teacher who always walks beside us.”

He also invited young people to pray to remain friends with Jesus and be “a companion on the journey for anyone I meet.”

“Through praying these words, our dialogue will continue each time we look at the crucified Lord, for our hearts will be united in him,” the pope concluded.

(OSV News) – St. John Henry Newman — the 19th-century theologian, intellectual and preacher who journeyed from Anglicanism to Catholicism, powerfully shaping religious thought in both faith traditions — will be named a doctor of the church by Pope Leo XIV.

The news was announced by the Vatican shortly after Pope Leo’s July 31 audience with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

The Vatican press bulletin stated that the pope had “confirmed the affirmative opinion of the plenary session of cardinals and bishops, members of the dicastery” for sainthood causes, on conferring the title, which since the early church has been bestowed on saints whose doctrinal writing and teachings are held to have special authority. St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great and St. Jerome were the first four doctors of the church, and excluding today’s announcement, there have been 37 saints so named — including four women, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Hildegard of Bingen.

The move had been supported by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who at their November 2023 plenary assembly voted almost unanimously to support a request by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales that Newman be named a doctor of the church by Pope Francis.

Speaking at the 2023 plenary, Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, said the USCCB doctrine committee, of which he is chair, “considered this matter back in 2019 and concluded that the writings of St. John Henry Newman are truly eminent and of great relevance for the church today, especially in the areas of the development of doctrine, the moral foundations of education, the primacy of conscience, the role of the laity and the search for the truth, amongst many others.

“The committee therefore determined that St. John Henry Newman is indeed worthy of this high honor,” said Bishop Flores at the time, who was joined in his remarks by several bishops.

According to an online biography by the Oratories of England, prepared for his canonization cause, John Henry Newman — born 1801 in London and raised in a middle-class Anglican family — displayed an early interest in Scripture.

In his “Apologia Pro Su Vita” (“A Defense of His Life”), his 1864 autobiography, Cardinal Newman recounted “a great change of thought” he experienced at the age of 15, one that enabled him to “rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator.”

With the revival sparked by John Wesley, Newman converted to evangelicalism during his final year at Great Ealing School. At 16, he went on to study at Oxford, which along with Cambridge University offered seminary formation for Anglican clergy — a vocation Newman sought out, even looking to take what for that clerical tradition was the unusual vow of celibacy. He was ordained in 1825, and dedicated himself to making pastoral visits to the sick and the poor while also tutoring college students, said the Oratories biography.

However, Newman’s zealous sharing of his faith with the students led to a clash with the administration, and deprived of the opportunity to teach, he began reading the works of the Fathers of the Church, which he described in part as “music to my inward ear” and “response to ideas … I had cherished so long.”

Newman’s preaching began to attract national attention, and a near-fatal bout of illness in 1833, contracted while in Sicily — which saw him feverishly repeat, “I have a work to do in England” — intensified his desire for the renewal of the church. Upon returning to his homeland, Newman teamed up with like-minded others who feared the Church of England had become complacent and politicized, said the Oratories. The group formed what would become known as the Oxford Movement, publishing tracts to rouse faithful from their torpor and reclaim the Gospel.

The future saint fell afoul of the university and Oxford’s bishop by arguing that the Church of England’s doctrines were more Catholic than Protestant. Newman left Oxford, and took up residence in the nearby village of Littlemore, where he pursued study and prayer. Resigning from his parish, he began to discern — albeit not without struggle, as the Oratories observed — a calling to embrace the Catholic faith.

In the canonization cause biography, the Oratories pointed out that Newman’s battle with sacred tradition on matters such as purgatory and papal supremacy spurred further historical study, leading to his 1845 “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” in which he described ideas and doctrines as organic, with “old principles” reappearing “under new forms.” Newman observed in the work that “in a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

That same year, he was formally received into the Catholic Church — making his confession right in his home to a Passionist missionary priest, Father Dominic Barberi, and speaking at such length that the priest had him resume the following morning.

Newman’s conversion led to the loss not only of his Oxford fellowship, but of most of his Anglican friends and his family. Yet, said the Oratories, he also wrote of a great peace amid the isolation — describing the conversion as “like coming into port after a rough sea.”

In 1847, Newman — having completed additional study — was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome, where he became acquainted with the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri, whose communal way of life recalled the college fellowship of his university days. A year later, with papal approval, he established the first Oratory of St. Philip in England at Birmingham, with a second founded in London the following year.

Expanding his ministry to Ireland, Father Newman became the rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College Dublin, under the leadership of Ireland’s Catholic bishops. Through his religious, spiritual and intellectual thought, Newman synthesized the pursuit of knowledge and of God, writing that “knowledge is one thing, virtue is another.”

The demands of his role in Dublin — which saw him make 56 sea crossings from Britain to Ireland in just seven years — proved exhausting, said the Oratories, and in 1858 he returned to the Birmingham Oratory.

The succeeding two decades were marked by struggles with both Catholics and Anglicans — with some of the former distrustful of his conversion, and the latter claiming he had never been an honest Anglican in the first place. In response, Father Newman penned his massive 1864 Apologia to “show what I am … I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow.”

The candor of his writing helped to assuage both Anglican and Catholic fears, and Father Newman was even invited to serve as an expert theological adviser at the First Vatican Council in 1868 — although, the Oratories noted, he declined in order to complete “The Grammar of Assent,” which considers the process by which an individual espouses convictions.

In 1874, he countered Prime Minister William Gladstone’s assertion that Catholics could not be loyal subjects due to their papal allegiance, with Newman writing in an open letter that his coreligionists did not deserve “this injurious reproach that we are captives and slaves of the Pope,” quoted the Oratories.

Three years later, Father Newman returned to Oxford and received the first honorary fellowship of Trinity College. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII named him a cardinal, extolling his fidelity to the faith, and granted his request to remain in Birmingham and forego consecration as a bishop. The elevation was lauded by Catholics and Anglicans alike, said the Oratories.

In Birmingham, Cardinal Newman continued to write, pondering in one of his final works — quoted by the Oratories in the online canonization biography — that God “has provided for the creation of the Saint out of the sinner … He enters into the heart of man, and persuades it, and prevails with it, while He changes it.”

Cardinal Newman died at age 89 in 1890 and was canonized in 2019 by Pope Francis.

(OSV News) – “He is the one Englishman of that era who upheld the ancient creed with a knowledge that only theologians possess, a Shakespearean force of style, and a fervor worthy of the saints.”

This description of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), from the 1913 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia, captures well three of the many impressive qualities of the man: his theological knowledge, his masterful literary abilities and his holiness.

On July 31, the Holy See announced that Pope Leo XIV would soon proclaim the saint a doctor of the church, acknowledging his significant contribution to Catholic theology.

Given Cardinal Newman’s reputation during his lifetime, both for his prodigious intellect and for his personal sanctity, support for his canonization not surprisingly began at his death. An article in America magazine in 1941, along with Pope Pius XII’s support of the 1945 “Centenary of Newman’s Conversion,” played essential roles in moving the process along.

In an address to the Cardinal Newman Academic Symposium in 1975, St. Paul VI acknowledged the powerful and ongoing witness of Cardinal Newman: “He who was convinced of being faithful throughout his life, with all his heart devoted to the light of truth, today becomes an ever brighter beacon for all who are seeking an informed orientation and sure guidance amid the uncertainties of the modern world — a world which he himself prophetically foresaw.”

In fact, the Pope had hoped that he might celebrate the Holy Year of 1975 with the beatification of the English cardinal. But more research was needed before that event could take place.

Finally, in January 1991, Pope John Paul II declared Cardinal Newman to be “venerable.” He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in London in 2010, and he was canonized by Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 13, 2019.

In October 2008, Cardinal Newman’s bones were exhumed and nothing was found save a few red tassels from his cardinal’s hat. Damp conditions had led to the decomposition of the body, thus frustrating the intended move of his remains from a cemetery in Rednal, Worcestershire, to a sarcophagus at Birmingham Oratory.

Cardinal Newman had founded the oratory in the 1840s after he left the Anglican denomination to enter the Catholic Church.

It was Cardinal Newman’s dramatic conversion that captured, and still captures, the attention and imagination of so many.

Born into a family of bankers, the eldest of six children, the shy and studious Newman had a fondness for reading the Bible and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The religion of his youth was Anglican and evangelical in nature; he described it in his biographical “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” (1864) as “Bible religion.” (It was also quite anti-Catholic.)

The future cardinal once wrote that he “had no formed religious convictions” until he was 15. “Of course,” he added, “I had a perfect knowledge of my catechism.”

The teenager experienced a profound crisis of faith in 1816, but emerged from it with a newfound fervor, evidenced by his frequent reception of communion in the Anglican Church and taking a private vow of celibacy. At 21 he was a professor at Oriel College, Oxford, and was ordained in June 1824 as a priest in the Anglican Communion.

Newman was a curate of St. Clement’s, Oxford, for two years, and then served as vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, the university church, where he overcame his shyness. Several years of impressive scholarly work followed, including his first major publication, “The Arians of the Fourth Century” (1833).

Much of that work had to do with early church history and the Church Fathers. Such study would eventually lead him to communion with Rome.

During the 1830s, Newman became a leader in the Oxford Movement, which consisted of several Oxford theologians who addressed key issues relating to the authority, nature and history of the Anglican Communion. They also sought to reinvigorate what they considered to be a spiritually lethargic institution.

Because of the many theological tracts published by Newman and others, the movement became known as Tractarianism. In Tract 90, published in 1841, Newman argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles — the defining creedal statements of Anglicanism established in 1563 — were essentially Catholic teachings.

This led to controversy and to Newman’s forced resignation from Oxford.

“From the end of 1841,” he wrote in the “Apologia,” “I was on my deathbed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church.”

Newman retired to the village of Littlemore with a small group of followers and lived a semi-monastic life as he worked on his now-famous “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.” It was during his years there that he worked through his various concerns and questions about Catholic doctrine.

He preached his last sermon at St. Mary’s in September 1843, and shortly thereafter he published a retraction of his previous attacks on the Catholic Church.

On Oct. 8, 1845, with his “Essay” still not completed (he never did finish it), Newman wrote: “I am this night expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist. … I mean to ask of him admission into the One Fold of Christ.”

Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian, received Newman into the Catholic Church the next day.

The following October, the new convert traveled to Rome, where he was ordained a Catholic priest and given a doctorate in divinity by Pope Pius IX himself. Father Newman joined the Congregation of the Oratory and, having been given a papal brief, set up an oratory in Birmingham, England.

The years of Cardinal Newman’s life were nearly equally divided between those when he was non-Catholic and those when he was Catholic, and the second half of his life, like the first, did not lack for controversy.

“Apologia Pro Vita Sua” was published in response to personal attacks against him by novelist Charles Kingsley. In it, he defended the civic loyalty of English Catholics against the accusations of William Gladstone.

At the same time, many Catholics remained wary of the new priest, not only because he was a convert, but also because some considered him to be a liberal. This accusation stemmed in part from his concerns about the First Vatican Council’s formal definition of the dogma of papal infallibility. In his “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk” (1875), however, he affirmed that he had always believed in the doctrine.

Whatever may have been the qualms of some Catholics about his thinking, in 1879 the convert priest was named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII.

Cardinal Newman has sometimes been called the “Father of Vatican II” because of the influence of his writings on several key areas of theology and practice. Pope Paul VI, in his 1975 address, highlighted this influence:

“Many of the problems which (Newman) treated with wisdom — although he himself was frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted in his own time — were the subjects of the discussion and study of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, as for example the question of ecumenism, the relationship between Christianity and the world, the emphasis on the role of the laity in the church and the relationship of the church to non-Christian religions.”

In a 1990 address given on the first centenary of Cardinal Newman’s death, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote:

“The characteristic of the great doctor of the church, it seems to me, is that he teaches not only through his thought and speech but also by his life, because within him, thought and life is interpenetrated and defined. If this is so, then Newman belongs to the great teachers of the church, because he both touches our hearts and enlightens our thinking.”

Shortly before his death, Cardinal Newman asked Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham to bless him. Bishop Ullathorne, deeply moved by the request, later wrote: “I felt annihilated in his presence. There is a saint in that man.”