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This is a breaking news story. Pope Leo XIV’s full interview with NBC’s Tom Llamas aired tonight on Nightly News, and I will update this post later this evening as it develops.

NBC anchor Tom Llamas put one question to Pope Leo XIV in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday: what do you love about America?

“So many things,” the pope answered. “The sense of freedom, the sense of opportunity, the sense of having invited for generations people from around the world to be part of America.”

Then he told Llamas where that answer comes from. “I come from a family where my grandparents were immigrants. On my mother’s side, we have people who were both slaves and slave owners.” That inheritance, he said, taught him to recognize “one of the greatest wealths of the United States” — the people this country has welcomed from everywhere, for generations.

NBC aired the full interview tonight on Nightly News, where Llamas presses the pope on what defines his love for America and what it means to be the first American to hold the office.

Llamas also asked when the pope will visit the United States. “In the next couple of years,” Leo answered.

That timeline carries a history. The Trump White House wanted the pope in America for the nation’s 250th anniversary this summer — Letters from Leo covered the break when Leo chose Lampedusa instead, spending the Fourth of July at Mass with migrants at Europe’s southern door.

I was on the island that morning, and before Mass began I got to wish the first American pope a happy Fourth of July.

Letters from Leo readers know Leo’s family tree well. Henry Louis Gates walked the pope through it last summer — Black ancestors, slaveholders both white and Black, a Creole lineage running through New Orleans.

His mother, Mildred Prevost, grew up inside that inheritance before the family reached Chicago. Until Wednesday, though, Leo had never said the words himself with a camera rolling.

Hours before Llamas’s interview, the same gardens filled with children.

By evening, 164 of them stood on a red stage at Borgo Laudato si’ and sang for the pope who spends his Augusts there. They came from the Holy Land, Uganda, Haiti, and Italy. Andrea Bocelli stood among them and opened the hour with Panis Angelicus, the “Bread of Angels.”

NBC News and Noticias Telemundo carried the Concert for Peace live across the United States, with Llamas anchoring alongside the Dominican friar Fr. Patrick Briscoe. Vatican officials called it the Canticle of Peace, staged to mark eight hundred years since the death of St. Francis of Assisi.

Cardinal Fabio Baggio, who runs the Laudato Si’ Higher Education Center with the Andrea Bocelli Foundation, built the evening around one idea: children who have buried friends and fled violence can still teach the rest of us what peace sounds like.

This is the same lawn where, three weeks ago, Pope Leo set aside his prepared remarks to share a meal with two hundred of Rome’s poorest residents — a pattern Letters from Leo has tracked since he and his predecessor, Francis, first turned Castel Gandolfo into a place for the people Rome usually keeps at arm’s length.

Between the choir’s sets, readers took turns with Scripture and papal teaching. One voice opened the Book of Genesis, the world spoken into being line by line.

A choir member recited St. Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures. Someone else read the peace prayer attributed to the saint, the one that asks to sow love where there is hatred and pardon where there is injury.

And then, read aloud on the pope’s own grounds, came a passage from Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti: that the goods belonging to one nation cannot be withheld from “a needy person coming from elsewhere,” because, in the encyclical’s own words, “each country also belongs to the foreigner.” Whether someone was born in Ohio or Kampala does not change what is owed them.

It’s important to consider what that means. The pope has just told an American news anchor that same day that his own grandparents were immigrants and that his own bloodline holds both the enslaved and their owners.

The Church’s argument about the foreigner is not an abstraction to him. It is a family story.

America’s bishops have been making the same argument for two years, through a Trump-Vance administration that keeps running deportation raids through parishes and courthouses.

Cardinal Dolan invoked Jesus and the Statue of Liberty and was branded a traitor for it. Archbishop Farrell called the administration’s rhetoric what it is on the same day Pope Leo prayed with migrants on Lampedusa. Detroit’s Archbishop Weisenburger stood outside an ICE facility to say immigrants deserve a voice. None of it has slowed the raids.

The concert’s sharpest political statement was the guest list.

A girl from Bethlehem stood with the other children and asked the pope, and asked God, why adults find peace so hard. The children’s own prayer put it plainer than any homily could: war, they said, is “a dark night that takes away our friends, our parents, our schools, and our homes,” and no one can tell them why.

Pope Leo answered them the way he answers most things: gently, and without a single reference to any president. He told them beauty works like a stream flowing back toward its source, and that following it leads somewhere real — “the beauty of music invites us to encounter the one who is beauty itself.”

He thanked the Bocelli Foundation for its work with “young people who experience educational and social disadvantages,” then prayed that peace would reign “in your homes, and in all those places throughout the world that continue to suffer from violence.”

Llamas closed the broadcast by noting, almost in passing, that the pope had touched on the plight of migrants during the hour. Fr. Briscoe, watching beside him, said what struck him most was how much hope the moment supplied. Neither man needed to spell out why an American audience might need that reminder more than most.

A pope descended from immigrants, from enslaved people, and from the men who owned them stood in a garden outside Rome and let children from the Holy Land, from Uganda, from Haiti, and from Italy sing together as equals, with no hierarchy of whose suffering counted more.

Then a reading from his predecessor’s encyclical told the audience that a country belongs to the foreigner too. Meanwhile, the country that gave this pope his accent — and his ancestors their chains — is running raids that split families over paperwork.

Letters from Leo has covered the raids, the bishops’ rebukes, and the pope’s own appeals for two years now, because the gap between Castel Gandolfo and the border keeps widening instead of closing. Wednesday did not close it either.

But between a morning confession about slavery and an evening of children singing for peace, the first American pope showed his country its own reflection — the immigrant, the enslaved, the slaveowner, all in one family, all in one man.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the 164 children who sang at Castel Gandolfo, and with every American Catholic who has watched this pope insist, again and again, that a nation’s goods and a nation’s welcome do not stop at a fence.

We believe, with Pope Leo and with Pope Francis before him, that the foreigner has a claim on this country too — not because of any party’s platform, but because human dignity does not check a passport first.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something more honest than the cruelty on their television screens.

They are looking for a Church that still believes a choir of children who have known war can teach a superpower something about peace — and on Wednesday, at the pope’s own summer home, it did.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a politics that treats children like these as a border problem to be solved — 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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On Tuesday night, Haitian families filled the pews of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Takoma Park, Maryland, for a mass of solidarity with a community that had just lost the protection of American law.

Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitians expired the day before.

“I’m here for those who cannot be here,” Carole Philogene Coaxum told DC News Now from the parish. “I’m here to basically let them know that we’re praying, that we’re standing with them.”

Another worshipper, Yvanne Jean-Louis, was blunter: “I don’t know why they pick on Haitians like that.”

Marie Lourdes Price, an American citizen for 30 years with loved ones on TPS, described what awaits them in Haiti: “Going back is not safe. The people have no idea.”

Washington created TPS for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people. For sixteen years, the protection held — through cholera, hurricanes, a presidential assassination, and the gang conquest of Port-au-Prince — surviving even the first Trump administration’s attempt to end it.

The Trump administration ordered the program terminated in June 2025, claiming conditions in Haiti had improved. The State Department, at that very moment, held Haiti at Level 4 — do not travel — citing kidnapping, gang violence, and civil unrest.

The courts held the line for a year. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the termination in February after finding it rooted “in part” in “racial animus.” Then, on June 25, the Supreme Court swept the litigation aside, ruling 6 to 3 that the courts cannot second-guess the process behind the secretary of homeland security’s decision to end the protections. The final court-ordered extension ran out Monday.

Work permits went void overnight, from Miami’s nursing homes to the factory floors of Springfield, Ohio, where Republican Gov. Mike DeWine observed that “while these Haitians were working and contributing to our community and economy yesterday, today it is now illegal to employ them.” ICE is preparing flights to Cap-Haïtien, in the country’s north, because the capital is considered too unstable to receive them.

The Department of Homeland Security marked the deadline with this: “What we would say now is it’s closing time which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami flew to Washington on Monday to fight it. For two days he worked the Senate alongside other faith leaders, pressing for the bill that would extend Haitian protections three more years — a measure the House passed in April, 224 to 204, with all three South Florida Republicans voting yes.

“It’s like sending people back into a burning house,” he said.

The archbishop counts the cost inside his own institutions: “In the Archdiocese of Miami, in our nursing homes, I have over 40 people on TPS that will lose their work permits today, and we will have to let them go.”

Wenski has spent his whole priesthood beside Haiti’s people. He learned Haitian Creole as a young priest, led the Notre Dame d’Haiti mission in Miami’s Little Haiti, and appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend Haitian asylum seekers in 2002.

Last summer he rode his Harley to the gates of Alligator Alcatraz and prayed the rosary for the men caged there. He returned in December to celebrate Christmas Mass inside the camp after months of stonewalling from the administration. In April, that same administration stripped $11 million from Miami’s Catholic Charities, forcing the closure of a children’s shelter whose lineage runs back to Operation Pedro Pan.

“To make America great again is a worthy goal,” Wenski wrote on Friday, “but you don’t make America great by making America mean.”

The Senate answered him with an objection. Democrats sought unanimous consent on July 22 to pass the extension; Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri rose against it, and the bill died on the floor five days before the deadline.

The deportation machine has already reached the Church’s own ministers. In the Archdiocese of Dubuque, two Haitian priests — Father Emmanuel Fenelus and Father Jangill Maime, each serving Iowa parishes for more than three years — watched their visas expire Tuesday while their renewals sat in a yearlong backlog. Their archdiocese can no longer legally pay them.

A bipartisan fix, the Religious Workforce Protection Act, has waited in the Judiciary Committees of both chambers since April of last year without so much as a hearing.

And there is Sister Leticia Ugboaja. ICE agents seized the 56-year-old sister and nurse on June 28 as she walked to Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish in McAllen, Texas — a church that shares its name with the one where Haitians prayed Tuesday night. The agents took her rosary. Hours later, after her parish and two congressmen — a Republican and a Democrat — demanded answers, she was released.

Her ordeal continues. She avoided detention at an ICE check-in Tuesday, Border Report noted, but the government still intends to deport her to a third country — a woman an immigration judge already ruled would likely be tortured if sent back to Nigeria.

“For me, a nun, not to go to Mass on Sunday, not to receive Communion, it was very, very heartbreaking,” she said last week.

Pope Leo XIV has pressed the Haitians’ case since the first summer of his pontificate. “The situation of the people of Haiti … is increasingly desperate,” he said at his Angelus last August. “Reports of murders, violence of all kinds, human trafficking, forced exile and kidnappings continue to pour in.” On Christmas Day, from the loggia of St. Peter’s, he prayed “for the beloved people of Haiti, that all forms of violence in the country will cease.”

His verdict on the American deportation campaign is just as plain.

“Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” he told reporters in September.

In November he called the treatment of longtime immigrant residents “extremely disrespectful, to say the least” and invited “especially all Catholics” to listen carefully to the U.S. bishops’ special message against mass deportation — a rebuke the bishops adopted 216 to 5, their first of its kind in twelve years, at his urging.

Asked in June about the mass-expulsion ideology now fashionable on the American and European right, the pope answered: “So simply saying, ‘We’ll send them away, so we can wash our hands of the problem,’ doesn’t seem like the most Christian response to me.”

The administration has answered its Church with contempt.

Vice President JD Vance began 2025 by suggesting the bishops defend immigrants to protect their “bottom line” — a charge he privately admitted was false, Cardinal Timothy Dolan later revealed. ICE started targeting Church property that same January, when the administration tore up the policy that had kept enforcement away from houses of worship since 2011.

By this spring, Trump was attacking the pope on Truth Social as “WEAK on Crime” and demanding he quit “catering to the Radical Left.” Border czar Tom Homan supplied his own theology this year, musing that “if we jumped the wall at the Vatican, the penalties for doing that are much harder than the ones here in the United States.”

Last week the administration sued the Church itself, seeking to remove a shrine to build the border wall.

Wenski has already named what is happening here. “It would be an act of abject cruelty,” he said last month, “for the United States to send families back to such dangerous and unsafe conditions.”

The Gospel leaves no room for maneuver on this. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Christ says in Matthew 25 — the verse Pope Leo set near the heart of Dilexi Te, his first apostolic exhortation, where he wrote of the Church: “Where the world sees threats, she sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges.”

The hundreds of thousands of people this administration wants gone care for America’s sick and elderly, raise tens of thousands of American children, and fill the pews of parishes from Miami to Springfield to Takoma Park. Our government tells its own citizens not to set foot in Haiti, and it is about to fill planes with people it insists belong there.

The people in the pews Tuesday night answered with prayer. “God is our strength. We are a strong community. We are a strong people of Haiti,” Coaxum said. “And we will … get over it. We will make it.”

To them, Wenski addressed the last words of his statement: “You are not alone. The Catholic Church walks with you.”

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Wenski, with Sister Letty, and with the Haitian faithful of Our Lady of Sorrows — the families who filled a church in Maryland this week to pray for neighbors the government has marked for removal.

This community is rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice. The Gospel was written by people who knew exile, and Jesus himself spent his infancy as a refugee fleeing state violence.

Letters from Leo has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than propaganda — for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action.

This week, as hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters lost the protection of the law, that hunger became an emergency.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a deportation machine now aimed at the Church’s own people — 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.

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I spent two weeks in Rome and throughout Italy earlier this month, my longest stay since attending the funeral of Pope Francis and the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV.

I filed stories during the day, but with a heat index surging over 100 degrees, the conversations that mattered the most often started after dark, in Curia offices, in church sanctuaries, and at trattoria tables, where I drank more espresso than any human ever ought to.

Fourteen months into this pontificate, the people closest to Pope Leo XIV are still working out who he is and where he’s taking us. Here are five lessons Rome taught me about the first U.S.-born pope — and the one thing the city asked of the rest of us to help him in his mission.

1. We are still getting to know him

The correspondents who cover Leo for a living describe him as an open question. His pre-conclave record offers them little help, and the people who tried hardest to mine that record now own one of the more embarrassing stories in Rome.

Before the cardinals gathered last spring, a well-funded conservative operation called the College of Cardinals Report assembled dossiers on the leading candidates.

Its naked goal was to ‘expose’ liberal candidates and assure the cardinals elected a pontiff in their own image and likeness.

Its researchers hunted for a paper trail on Robert Prevost and came back nearly empty-handed. No books. He spoke sparingly on contested questions, and the weightiest entry in his written record was a canon law dissertation from the late 1980s.

But their research missed the biggest piece of evidence sitting in plain sight: Prevost kept a public account on X carrying years of left-of-center statements on gun control, immigration, and this administration’s appetite for war, with an unmistakable pro-life from womb to tomb witness threaded throughout.

All that money, and nobody read the man’s Twitter.

The thin file has a biography behind it. Ordained a priest in 1982, Prevost spent his formative decades as a missionary in Peru, led the worldwide Augustinian order from Rome, and went back to Peru as a bishop; the Vatican only claimed him for good in 2023, two years before the conclave.

He learned what it means to be a priest — pastor, missionary, brother among brothers — for more than three decades before the Church made him a diocesan bishop at fifty-nine. It shows in how little he needs the sound of his own voice.

On the Church’s internal quarrels, Leo is mostly keeping his powder dry. Most I talked to in Rome see that as a purposeful strategy.

2. The operating manual is from an Irish novelist

One document surfaced in my conversations more than anything Leo has written himself, and a novelist produced it as comedic relief.

Two weeks after the conclave, Colm Tóibín published a remarkable essay in the London Review of Books.

Read more

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.

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Today’s Readings

“The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.” — Matthew 13:45-46

The merchant in today’s Gospel has a job description hidden in the Greek. Matthew calls him an emporos, a wholesaler who traveled for a living, as opposed to the kapelos who kept a stall in town and waited for customers to walk past. Jesus could have used the shopkeeper. He picked the man on the road.

Look at who fills these three parables. Someone is crossing a field that does not belong to him when his foot catches on something buried. A pearl dealer has traveled to reach the market he is working. Out on the lake, a net drags behind a boat. Nobody in this Gospel is sitting still.

Yesterday, on the feast of St. Christopher, I wrote about a ferryman who met God in the middle of a flooding river rather than safely on the bank. Today Jesus makes the same case three times in a row.

Pope Francis said it in his first long interview as pope: “Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith.” We’ll explore this more in depth below.

Motion on its own is just restlessness. What makes these three men more than wanderers is that they are looking for something, fueled by a desire they cannot argue themselves out of.

Preaching this Gospel at the Angelus this morning in Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo XIV described the moment the search pays off. The parables “convey the surprise of those who find something far beyond what they could have hoped for, so much so that selling or leaving everything behind no longer seems a sacrifice, but a gain.”

He also named the counterfeit that runs on the same fuel: “the consumer culture influences our tastes, constantly creating new needs only to sell us solutions that never satisfy, and that sometimes even poison the heart.”

Force has nothing to do with any of it. What the kingdom uses is attraction, the pull a real pearl exerts on a man who has spent his career learning to spot one.

My favorite Tennessee writer, Alex Haley, the author of Roots, lived his life by a motto that embodies the spirit of this pilgrim on the move.

Read more

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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:

• 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 get the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, and the exclusive investigations that no one else in Catholic media is willing to run.

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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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.

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

Paid members receive our exclusive series on the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, our investigations — including the Epstein-Bannon files — and our Sunday scripture reflections.

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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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.

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

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.

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 ne…

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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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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…

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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. T…

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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 …

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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.

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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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