Dear friends —

Before you read today’s essay, one important note:

Anyone who purchases a yearly subscription to Letters from Leo or donates $80 or more from this post will receive a free copy of Elise Ann Allen’s Pope Leo XIV: The Biography.

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On an afternoon in July 2025, Elise Ann Allen sat across from Pope Leo XIV in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo with an iPhone recording them.

They met again a few weeks later inside the papal apartment at the Holy Office in the Vatican for a second session — ninety minutes apiece across two days, producing a thirty-five-page transcript that became the first sustained, on-the-record conversation any English-speaking journalist has had with this pope since white smoke rose over St. Peter’s Square last May.

The book is Pope Leo XIV: The Biography, released this week by Penguin Random House and now climbing the charts.

Its Spanish predecessor — published last fall by Penguin Peru as Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the XXI Century — made Allen the first journalist anywhere to publish an extended interview with this pope. The English edition arrives carrying that scoop into the country where Robert Prevost was born.

I tore through it in one sleepless night. I know I’m not alone. The English-speaking Catholic world has been waiting for this book since May 8.

This book is a great companion to Christopher Lamb’s exquisite biography of Leo XIV, with a thorough explanation of political implications, published last month, which I covered here, and which so many of you bought through a yearly subscription to Letters from Leo.

What makes Allen’s book unique is the interview itself — the first long-form, on-the-record sit-down of Leo’s pontificate.

Leo speaks in his own voice about the conclave, his Augustinian formation, his childhood on Chicago’s South Side, the church’s relationship with women and LGBT Catholics, Ukraine, China, the United States, and the abuse crisis that has shadowed his episcopate. There is no ghost-writer’s hedge here. The transcript runs the final 35 pages of the book, in English.

To understand how she got those three hours, you have to understand what came before. For the better part of a decade, Allen has been the world’s most stubborn investigator of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, the Peruvian movement that Pope Francis suppressed last year after years of documented psychological, sexual, and spiritual abuse.

She is herself a former member of the women’s branch. Her reporting from Lima, Piura, and Chiclayo earned her a long string of attacks and rebuttals from people powerful enough to bury most reporters.

It also brought her into the orbit of a quiet Augustinian bishop named Robert Prevost. As the Vatican investigation tore through the diocese of Chiclayo — where Prevost had served before his elevation to the Dicastery for Bishops — Allen stayed on the story while most of the English-speaking press looked away.

She knew the actors by name and had absorbed the cost of telling that truth firsthand, in a country where reporters who name names get sued and worse. Prevost, by every account, watched her work and remembered.

Allen’s own account in the book’s introduction makes that relationship plain. They first met in December 2018, when she traveled to Lima to investigate Sodalitium, and he was the president of the Peruvian bishops’ Safeguarding Commission.

After their first interview, he handed her his personal card — a gesture, she notes, that bishops do not typically extend to investigative journalists. Years later, when Francis brought him to Rome to lead the Dicastery for Bishops, Elise and her husband hosted him for dinner at their home; he traded jokes about sports, Peru, and the Vatican.

When Allen sat down with him at Castel Gandolfo on July 10, 2025 — the inaugural session of the interview that anchors this book — the new pope met her with an outstretched hand and an immediate question about her husband’s journey with stomach cancer.

That history is why Leo agreed, two months into his papacy, to do something that has never happened in the two millennia history of the Catholic Church — an unedited English-language interview with the Vicar of Christ.

Anyone who read Allen’s exchanges with Leo released by Crux last fall — drawn from those same Castel Gandolfo and Vatican sessions, ranging across Gaza, the deportations, and the Holy See’s posture toward Beijing — already glimpsed what the book makes plain.

Leo trusts her. He answers like a man who knows she has done the work. The biography turns those exchanges into a full portrait of a pope who is more politically relevant, more theologically pointed, and far more recognizably American than the early caricature allowed.

A word on the personal weight Allen has carried this year: her husband, the great Vatican journalist John L. Allen Jr., founder of Crux, died in Rome on January 22 after a long battle with cancer.

Elise carries on her husband’s legacy. But anyone who knows Elise knows that this book is hers alone — the reporting, the relationships, the voice — and that she was Crux’s senior Rome correspondent in her own right long before she was a widow.

What the biography reveals — and this is why every American Catholic should read it — is a pope whose moral seriousness has been radically underestimated. He grew up on Chicago’s South Side, in a working-class Catholic world that shaped his pastoral instincts long before Peru did.

The Augustinian assignments in Trujillo and Chiclayo taught him what the church owes the poor by demanding that he live among them.

The conclave, by Allen’s telling, did not move him by faction or bloc; he entered it as the candidate who had refused both. He took the name Leo, he tells her, in honor of Leo XIII — the father of modern Catholic social teaching — because the artificial-intelligence revolution and its threat to working people is, in his words, the moral test ahead of us.

And in his answers to Allen on Ukraine, on Gaza, on Donald Trump, on Elon Musk and the coming trillionaire economy (“if that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble”), Leo speaks like a man who has decided which moral lines he will not let go uncrossed.

On the clerical abuse crisis, Leo gives the answer of a careful canon lawyer. He calls it “a real crisis, unlike finances” that the Church “has to continue to address because it’s not solved,” and insists victims must be treated “with great respect” because their wounds “sometimes carry … for their entire lives.”

Then he talks about rights of the accused, the presumption of innocence, and his Francis-cited view that abuse “cannot become the central focus of the Church.” It is the answer of a man who lived through Chiclayo and knows the cost of abuse.

Gaza is where his voice sharpens.

Leo names the “innocent people in Gaza” and the children facing “not only deprivation but actual starvation,” acknowledges that the word genocide is “being thrown around more and more” — including by “two human rights groups in Israel who have made that statement” — and concedes that the Holy See has declined, for now, to make that declaration itself.

“We can’t grow numb,” he tells Allen, “and we can’t ignore this.”

His lines on the United States cut a different way. Leo has not met Donald Trump, who has publicly clashed with the pope over the Iran war.

Asked by reporters at the White House earlier this month whether he planned to meet Leo, the president said, “I haven’t met him, but I disagree with the pope” — though he allowed that Leo’s brother Louis Prevost is “actually a great guy.” Leo, for his part, tells Allen that if a chance to engage on specific issues arises, he would have no problem taking it.

His one sustained conversation with JD Vance, he says, turned on “human dignity and how important that is for all people, wherever you’re born.” He will not get involved in partisan politics, he tells Allen, but he will not stop raising “real gospel issues” that “people on both sides of the aisle” need to hear.

The book is also, quietly, the first real accounting of how a Vatican investigator from Chicago became the man who would inherit Francis’s reform agenda. Allen does not flinch from the Peruvian record — she lays it out, gives the survivors the page, and presses Leo on every line of the questions that have followed him since the conclave.

That is the book Allen has given us. The journalist who wrote it earned every page through years that almost no other reporter was willing to spend, and the relationship she built in those years will keep producing the clearest English-language window into this papacy for as long as Leo lives.

Buy this book. Read it cover to cover. Give it to the person in your life who wants to understand who this pope really is.

And if you want a free copy, join our community as a yearly paid subscriber or make a one-time donation of $80 or more — directly from this post — before Friday, May 1, at 11:59 PM PT.

At Letters from Leo, we honor the reporters who do the hard work that the rest of the press will not.

Elise Allen at Crux, who has spent years investigating the Peruvian abuse story, sitting with survivors and ex-members that most outlets never bothered to find, and filing copy long after most newsrooms have moved on.

The biography she has just published is the fruit of that decade of labor, and the English-speaking church is better for every page of it.

The biography she has just published is the fruit of that decade of labor, and the English-speaking church is better for every page of it.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because we are hungry for something deeper — for writing that takes the Gospel and the abuse of the Gospel with equal seriousness, and for a movement that refuses to bow to the idols of fear, secrecy, and power.

If you believe that hunger matters — and that this papacy deserves a serious American readership grounded in the dignity of every human being — I am asking you to join us.

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

• 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 would read the book.

Paid members receive my full biographical series on the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, the American pope who now carries Francis’s mission into a new era. You’ll also get access to exclusive investigations, including my ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the best of our full archive.

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

Before you read on, join 75,000 Americans and sign our letter to President Trump demanding that he apologize for attacking Pope Leo XIV. We’ll deliver it to the president via JD Vance.

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A recent NBC News survey of 4,557 American adults gives Pope Leo XIV a net favorability rating of plus thirty-four. Donald Trump’s net favorability in the same poll is negative twelve. That is a 46 point gap between the first American pope and the American president — a gap measured during a month of sustained public attacks from Trump on the Holy Father.

The numbers did not arrive without context.

On April 5, Pope Leo XIV used his Easter address to command the warring nations of the world to “lay down your weapons.” Six days later, he stood inside St. Peter’s Basilica and warned of a “delusion of omnipotence” fueling the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

That weekend, 60 Minutes aired.

In the joint interview with Norah O’Donnell, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington was asked whether the war in Iran is a just war. McElroy answered: “In Catholic teaching, this is not a just war.” He went on: “This is a war of choice that we went to, and I think it’s embedded in a wider moment in the United States that’s worrying.”

Beside him, Newark’s Cardinal Joseph Tobin defended his January description of ICE as “a lawless organization,” arguing that the agency forces its officers to “hide their identities to terrify people” in violation of the Constitution.

Then, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, took aim at the White House’s habit of splicing movie clips with bombing footage on social media — a practice he called “sickening” and a “gamification” of war that, in his words, dehumanizes the killing of children and American soldiers by turning their suffering into entertainment.

Within minutes of the broadcast, the president responded on Truth Social.

Pope Leo XIV was, Trump wrote, “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Trump followed with an AI-generated image of himself wrapped in a heavenly embrace by Jesus Christ. Catholic conservatives erupted. Even some of Trump’s own evangelical allies called the image “gross blasphemy.”

From the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, the president told reporters Pope Leo XIV should “get his act together” and “stop catering to the radical left.”

Speaking with NBC News on April 12, the pope said he had “no fear of the Trump administration” and would keep “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel.”

The voters were watching, and the early returns are punishing. A Public Religion Research Institute survey released this month shows Trump’s favorability among Latino Catholic voters has collapsed from forty-one percent in November 2024 to twenty-five percent today.

On the war itself, a YouGov poll fielded April 17 through April 20 measured a twenty-point chasm: 48% of Americans said they agreed more with Pope Leo XIV on Iran, 28% with Trump and Vance.

Among American Catholics overall, Pope Leo XIV’s approval rating is 84%.

Trump’s national approval hovers near forty. Vice President JD Vance — a Catholic convert who personally led the Iran negotiations in Pakistan and came home empty-handed — carries a net favorability of negative eleven among the very Catholics he was meant to bring home for the Republican Party.

On the Sunday evening of the attack, Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, addressed Trump’s social media post directly. “I am disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father,” Coakley wrote. “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.”

Within forty-eight hours, dozens of American bishops echoed him. The U.S. hierarchy, fractured for a decade by liturgical, political, and personal feuds, has not stood this unified in a generation.

Pope Leo XIV did not ask for any of this. He has avoided naming the president in nearly every public address since the war began, keeping his focus on Iran, on the children of Tehran and Isfahan, and on the moral demands of the Sermon on the Mount, where the peacemakers are the ones called sons and daughters of God.

He has spoken in St. Peter’s Square about peace, in Cameroon about the suffering of African Christians, and in private letters to American lawmakers about the cost of perpetual war on the human family.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has used the past seventeen days to mock the pope, take credit for his election, and publish an AI-generated image of himself in the embrace of Christ on the same Truth Social feed where he calls the Holy Father weak.

As I have argued before, the president owns this confrontation entirely.

Six months from the midterms, Republicans are bleeding Catholics in the exact places they cannot afford to lose them. Voters who flipped the Sunbelt for the GOP in 2024 are drifting toward a pope they trust more than the man they elected.

PRRI president Robert P. Jones has called a sustained drop in Catholic support from 2024 levels “almost certain defeat” for Republicans in competitive races. And the man in white — silver-haired, bespectacled, born in Chicago — has only just begun to speak.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and people of every faith and no faith at all — who refuse to confuse the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the gospel of Donald Trump.

We stand with a pope speaking peace while bombs fall on Tehran, three U.S. cardinals naming the Iran war unjust on national television, and an American hierarchy that has told the White House the Vicar of Christ is not the president’s political rival.

In an era poisoned by the gamification of war and the AI sanctification of authoritarian power, this work could not be more urgent.

Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in America because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda — something rooted in human dignity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor that has guided the Church since the Sermon on the Mount.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the Gospel against authoritarian cruelty — I am asking you to join us.

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

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive reporting on Pope Leo XIV’s papacy, the Catholic Church, and the American political moment.

• 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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Tom Homan told Benny Johnson last week that he would be happy to take Pope Leo XIV on a ride-along with an ICE raid.

The moment came inside a packed Baylor University auditorium during Turning Point USA’s campus tour stop. Johnson, the MAGA podcaster who serves as the movement’s in-house catechist on grievance, asked whether this was the border czar’s “invitation to the Pope for a ridealong with ICE.”

Homan’s answer: “Yes. And I said that.”

Homan had laid out his credentials earlier in the same set.

“As a lifelong Catholic — baptized, first communion, confirmation — I love the Catholic church,” he told the crowd. “But you know it, they’re wrong.” Then came his framing for the room.

“I’m a little troubled right now. I call out the Pope.”

By the time he reached the offer to ride along, the border czar had already explained why he believed he was qualified to instruct the pontiff. “I’ll sit down and talk to them,”

Homan said of Leo and the cardinals who had spoken out, “because they’re talking about something they don’t understand.”

It is the same riff he has been running for months.

The premise, once the theatrics are stripped away, is that an American pope who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, spent decades in the poorest neighborhoods of northern Peru, and now reads the desperate letters of migrant families terrorized by federal raids is uninformed.

What Leo really needs, Homan keeps insisting, is forty minutes with the man who runs the raids.

One of the things I have learned from covering Tom Homan over the past year is that parochial-school education fifty years ago does not make you an expert on anything.

His claim to authority on the Church’s doctrine of migration rests on the credentials he just recited at Baylor — baptism, first communion, confirmation, and the fact that he attended a Catholic grade school in the 1960s.

On that, he has spent months offering to “educate” the first American pope about human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, and the moral status of the stranger.

Here’s the background.

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Dear friends —

One year ago today, I stood on the colonnades of St. Peter’s Basilica as the Church laid Pope Francis to rest.

I wrote the essay below for Newsweek that morning, in the hours after watching his wooden casket carried back into the basilica where Peter’s bones still lie.

I’m republishing it here on the anniversary of his funeral because the question Francis left us — whether we will live the Gospel he preached — has only grown more urgent in the twelve months since.

Pope Leo XIV now carries Peter’s ring. The mission he inherited from Francis is the same one Francis entrusted to every one of us.

Standing atop the colonnades of St. Peter’s Basilica this morning, I looked out over the hundreds of thousands gathered below and realized something astonishing: I was standing on the same hill where Peter himself — crucified upside down by Nero Caesar — died 2,000 years ago.

Today, Caesar’s empire is long gone. Peter’s Church remains. And today we were celebrating the remarkable life of his 265th successor.

For me — and for countless Catholics who have navigated the messy terrain of early adulthood into middle age — Francis was not just the Bishop of Rome. He was the pastor who showed us how to have an adult faith. How to follow Jesus even when life gets complicated. How to embrace our doubts rather than fear them.

I still remember his words from the first Sunday of Francis’s papacy in 2013: “God never tires of forgiving us.”

That line became a refrain for me, resurfacing during moments of failure, confusion, and distance from God. In an age where mercy often feels in short supply, Francis insisted there was no bottom to God’s well of forgiveness.

He did everything he could to keep us in the faith. And he made it clear: bad Catholics were welcome. Strugglers were welcome. Sinners were welcome.

The Eucharist, Francis taught, was not a prize for the perfect but “medicine for the sick.” For a generation raised to believe that holiness was synonymous with flawlessness, Francis offered something radically different and deeply freeing: a Christianity rooted in the grace of mercy.

In his every move and gesture, Francis embodied the heart of the Gospel. His famous pectoral cross, a simple image of the Good Shepherd carrying a lost sheep on his shoulders, wasn’t just a personal emblem. It was his mission statement. He was the pope who left the ninety-nine to go after the one.

For those of us who have ever felt like the one — the doubtful, the sinful, and the disillusioned — he was our pope.

The funeral itself was simple, almost jarringly so for a global figure of Francis’s magnitude. That was fitting. Francis lived by the idea that greatness is found in humility, not spectacle. His wooden casket was adorned only with the symbols of faith, hope, and love. His legacy was not built on grandiosity but on the small, stubborn acts of love and tenderness he encouraged in each of us.

From the start, Francis the Troublemaker unsettled both the world and the Church — not by chasing controversy, but by daring to act as if the Gospel were true. He stripped himself of his office’s trappings. He carried his own bags. He paid his own hotel bill. These simple actions weren’t about public relations; they were about reminding us who we are called to be: servants, not princes.

Over the years — through moments of faith and virtue, and stretches of doubt and vice — Francis reminded me that the Christian life isn’t a straight line. It’s a path walked by sinners who dare to believe they are loved anyway, and who keep walking because of it.

He showed us that hope has feet. It moves, even if haltingly, even if imperfectly. One inch forward, he said, is more pleasing to God than standing still. Francis taught us that stumbling forward in hope is itself an act of faith.

He made clear that the Church isn’t a museum for the virtuous but a field hospital for the wounded. In a polarized, often brutalized age, that vision has been both scandalous and salvific.

As his casket disappeared into the Basilica, I noticed something striking: the usual chants of “santo subito” — “sainthood immediately” — never rose up.

It made sense. Francis never sought canonization. He didn’t want a pedestal; he wanted us to get closer to Jesus.

There’s a quiet providence in the fact that he came from the only major Catholic religious order named not for its founder, but for Christ himself. Like his Jesuit brothers, Francis wasn’t building a movement around his own life. He was leading us back to the source of the faith itself.

In a Church that tends to obsess over its very self, I find it striking just how often Francis would utter the name of Jesus. It echoes what he said in his short “Gettysburg Address” before the 2013 conclave: the Church had become too self-referential, too caught up in itself, and needed to rediscover its true mission — to spread the joy of the Gospel.

Beneath the marble of St. Peter’s Basilica, Peter’s bones still rest. His spirit still moves through the Church he founded. Francis — the 265th since Peter to carry his office — tended that spirit with a fierce and stubborn hope.

On that ancient hill where a tyrannical empire once tried to crush the faith, we gathered not to bury a failed project, but to celebrate a victory that keeps echoing through the centuries.

If the Francis revolution has begun, it is not a matter of monuments. It is a matter of memory, mercy, and movement — and it is ours now to carry forward.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Francis and his successor, Pope Leo XIV.

One year after the Church carried Francis’s casket back into St. Peter’s, the world the new pope has inherited is crueler than the one his predecessor left him, and the Gospel he is called to preach is more urgent for it.

This community exists because readers like you believe Catholic witness in the public square must still be rooted in mercy for the wounded, a preferential love for the poor, and a Church that walks with its people rather than lording over them.

In an era poisoned by authoritarianism and cruelty, we remain rooted in the faith Francis embodied — a Gospel that refuses to flinch before injustice, rejects every idol of fear and power, and holds to the conviction Francis voiced in Spanish to the very end: todos, todos, todos.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda.

They’re looking for the kind of leadership Francis lived and Pope Leo XIV is now extending into a darker hour — proximity, tenderness, courage — and on the anniversary of the day we laid Francis to rest, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a rising authoritarianism that would crush the very people Francis spent his papacy defending — I am asking you to join us.

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

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive my full biographical series on the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, my ongoing investigations, and the full archive of my writing on Pope Francis’s papacy and legacy.

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

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who is carrying Francis’s memory with them today.

Paid members receive my full biographical series on the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, the American pope who now carries Francis’s mission into a new era. You’ll also get access to exclusive investigations, including my ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the best of our full archive.

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

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Dear friends,

Each Sunday, Letters from Leo published a Scripture reflection series.

This series is exclusively available to paid subscribers.

Each meditation explores what it means to follow Jesus more faithfully — not as partisans first, but as Christians whose consciences are shaped by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

These reflections are personal writing: vulnerable, searching, and grounded in the conviction that repentance, renewal, and resolve are not abstract concepts but daily choices.

If they’ve meant something to you this, I hope you’ll consider making a one-time gift to support our work.

I invite you to walk with us throughout these fifty days of Easter as we experience the joy of the risen Jesus.

PS — I created a Spotify playlist for your Easter season reflection. It comes directly from recommendations made by this community. I hope it helps as you rest in the peace of Easter.

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Today’s Readings

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. — John 10:10

Most of what runs the world rewards the climber — the person who scales the wall, takes what is on the other side, and is celebrated for when they’re done.

We have built our economy around it. Our politics. Most of our institutions. Even, increasingly, our churches.

Today’s gospel is Jesus’s quiet evisceration of that arrangement.

“Anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit.”

A sheepfold in first-century Judea was a stone enclosure with a single low opening, no door, the shepherd lying across the gap at night so nothing could get in or out without crossing his body. There were two ways to come to the sheep.

You could enter through the shepherd, who knew them, called them by name, and had nothing to hide. Or you could climb the wall.

Pope Leo XIV ordained ten new priests in St. Peter’s Basilica this morning and preached on this gospel. The line that has not left me all afternoon was not the most quotable one. It was simpler. “You belong to everyone and are for everyone.”

He told the new priests that today, especially when statistics suggest a growing distance between the Church and ordinary people, the answer is not to pull the gate tighter. “Keep the door open. Let people in, and be prepared to go out. You are a channel, not a filter.”

That is the whole homily for me. The whole season, maybe.

I write this as someone who has spent the last few years watching almost every institution I belong to become a filter.

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Pope Leo XIV welcomed parliamentarians from the European People’s Party to the Clementine Hall on Saturday morning and laid out a vision of Christian political engagement aimed squarely at the temptations of the moment.

The EPP is the center-right group that traces its lineage to Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, and Robert Schuman — the Christian-democratic architects of the postwar European project. Pope Leo blessed that inheritance, then warned what could become of it.

“Being a Christian in politics does not mean being overtly confessional. Instead, it means allowing the Gospel to guide the decisions that have to be made, even those that may not attract easy consensus.”

That single line is the architecture of the speech. Leo drew a distinction between prophetic religious witness, which belongs to the ecclesial community, and Christian witness expressed through concrete political choices — the work of legislators, not pulpits.

To collapse the two — to treat governance as a pulpit, or to dress legislation in scripture so as to baptize it — is, in his reading, a category error and a political vice.

In the United States, this is the default setting of one party. Speaker Mike Johnson tells reporters that his worldview is the Bible on a shelf. JD Vance defended mass deportation by mischaracterizing the medieval doctrine of ordo amoris, a move two popes have publicly rebuked. And while Donald Trump publicly wonders whether he was heaven-bound, he shares Franklin Graham’s imprimatur letter to his social media feed.

Pope Leo confronted none of that directly. He spoke instead to a more dangerous version of the same instinct — the temptation, available on every continent, to wear Christianity as the costume of a political program instead of letting it form the conscience underneath.

“Pursuing an ideal does not mean glorifying an ideology,” he said. Every ideology, he warned, “is always the result of a distortion of reality and a kind of violence imposed upon it.” Leo grew up in a Church that watched Christian language get conscripted into nationalism more than once. He has no interest in presiding over a third act.

The remedy he proposed has the quiet force of common sense. Politics, Leo said, must return to “the people” — to actual neighbors with concrete problems, rather than the rhetorical abstraction of populism.

That meant workers facing a market the pope called “increasingly dehumanizing,” young couples afraid to have children, and migrants whose root causes of displacement go unaddressed even as their bodies are turned into political content.

He called for politicians to abandon the era of “digital triumph” and return to the “analogue” — personal contact between citizens and their representatives, the slow rebuilding of community ties in the places where people actually live.

That return, Leo said, is “the real antidote to a politics that often shouts, consists only of slogans and is incapable of responding to people’s actual needs.”

To make the case, Leo turned to his predecessor. He quoted Pope Francis’s signature line from Evangelii Gaudium: “Unity is greater than conflict.” That isn’t a one-off.

Two weeks ago, Leo wrote to the College of Cardinals and confirmed that Evangelii Gaudium would be the guiding charter of his own pontificate, a document to be “relaunched” rather than archived.

By naming Francis on Saturday before a room of European center-right lawmakers — many of whom spent the last decade tilting toward the nationalist temptations Francis spent his papacy confronting — Leo answered a question that had hovered since his election. He intends to read the political moment through Francis’s lens, and he said so plainly.

The address was given to Europeans, and while the pope continually reminds us to understand him in context, it is hard to read his comments other than as a global critique.

The United States is a country led by Christians in public life, governed in significant part by men who quote scripture from the Capitol floor while signing the deportation orders that scripture’s own God seems to forbid.

To them, and to all of us, Leo offered a way that is neither secularist nor authoritarian. He said freedom of religion — which the pope on his return flight from Africa called a more urgent moral concern than the Church’s debates over sexual ethics — must be safeguarded everywhere, for everyone, because faith convinces no one through coercion.

A politics shaped by Christian conscience wins people through love, work, dignity, and presence. Bible-verse posts cannot get there.

That is the inheritance Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman left. Leo on Saturday asked the European People’s Party, and by implication the rest of us, to claim it again.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of Catholics — and people of every faith and none — who believe Christianity is a way of life, not a tool used for political effect.

The Gospel is supposed to form conscience for legislators, dignity in the workplace, mercy at the border, and a refusal to baptize cruelty in any form. Pope Leo XIV said as much to Europe’s Christian Democrats on Saturday morning. He could have said it just as easily to the U.S. Capitol.

In a moment when American power is wielded by men who post scripture on social media while running deportation flights, Letters from Leo exists to insist on the difference between Christian witness and Christian theater.

We are the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because readers are hungry for a faith that holds power accountable rather than blessing it.

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

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

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

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The Justice Department announced on Friday that federal executions can once again be carried out by firing squad, a method the United States government has not authorized since the 19th century.

Hours later, Pope Leo XIV released a video message to activists gathered at DePaul University in his hometown of Chicago. The occasion was the fifteenth anniversary of Illinois’s abolition of the death penalty.

“The Church affirms that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed,” the pope told the room.

In the short video, Leo offered what the Vatican described as his “support to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States of America and around the world.”

He celebrated Governor Pat Quinn’s 2011 decision to sign the repeal into law, cited the Catechism’s teaching that capital punishment is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and asked that the Illinois witness inspire others to take up “the same just cause.”

That was the public word.

The private one, which American Catholics only learned about last summer after a public-records request by WBEZ Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times, was sent fifteen years ago. On March 9, 2011 — the day Governor Quinn signed the abolition into law — a Chicago-born Augustinian priest typed a short message into a form on the governor’s website.

“Dear Governor Quinn, THANK YOU for your courageous decision in signing into law the elimination of the death penalty. I know it was a difficult decision, but I applaud your vision and your understanding of the very complex matter. You have my full support!”

The signature at the bottom read “Robert F. Prevost.” Fourteen years later, he would be elected the first American pope.

I wrote about that letter last August, when the archives first surfaced it, because of what it revealed about the future Pope Leo XIV: years before he was elected to the papacy, he was already on the record against capital punishment. The message to Quinn was nothing more than a private thank-you typed into a web form — a Chicago priest quietly applauding a governor whose courage he admired.

Friday’s DePaul address is that same conviction, grown up and broadcast to the world.

The timing was auspicious. A day earlier, speaking to reporters on the papal plane as he returned from his apostolic visit to Africa, the pope was asked about Iran’s recent surge of executions. He answered: “I condemn the taking of people’s lives. I condemn capital punishment.”

Last September, Leo told the country exactly what that conviction means for the American pro-life movement. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” he said at Castel Gandolfo, adding a line many U.S. bishops are still wrestling with: those who condemn abortion while embracing “the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” are, in the pope’s judgment, also not pro-life.

Quoting Francis by name at DePaul, Leo reminded American Catholics that the teaching is not his invention. “This is why Pope Francis and my recent predecessors repeatedly insisted that the common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment,” he said.

The line could be read as a reminder to Catholics drawn to Washington’s new execution regime: they have placed themselves at odds with the entire Catholic magisterium, Francis included.

The federal government on Friday deepened that rupture.

The Justice Department’s order expands the available execution methods to include firing squads, gas asphyxiation, and electrocution, alongside the existing lethal-injection protocol. Washington intends to accelerate the machinery of state-sanctioned killing, even as the American-born pope tells his home country to go a different direction.

The juxtaposition matters for another reason.

Almost a year into his papacy, Leo has shown no interest in retreating from American political argument.

He has denounced ICE raids in his hometown of Chicago, stood with Cardinal Blase Cupich on immigration, and urged U.S. bishops to speak louder when Washington turns cruel. The Illinois message on Friday fits that pattern; it is not a departure from it.

Which raises a question American Catholics have been circling for months.

When the federal government of the United States revives the firing squad — and the man in the white cassock, a Chicago-native priest, declares again that human dignity survives even our worst crimes — it is fair to ask who is actually leading the free world on the moral questions that still matter.

The answer, for now, is Pope Leo XIV.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the abolitionists who gathered at DePaul this weekend, with the nuns, priests, and Illinois Catholics who helped end state killing fifteen years ago, and with a pope who still believes — as he did in a short note to Pat Quinn in 2011 — that no human being forfeits the image of God, even after committing the worst of crimes.

In an America that now counts firing squads among its federal execution methods, Catholic faith cannot be collapsed into a partisan talking point. The Gospel demands more of us than that.

Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because thousands of readers are hungry for a Catholicism that is coherent, public, and unafraid — one that defends children at the beginning of life, migrants in detention, and the condemned in the execution chamber with the same moral voice.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the machinery of state-sanctioned killing — I am asking you to join us.

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

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

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Ken Klippenstein has published a report confirming that U.S. intelligence agencies have, for years, been spying on the Vatican — and that President Donald Trump’s April 12 broadside against Pope Leo XIV has now turned that surveillance into an operational priority.

According to Klippenstein’s reporting, when Trump declared Leo “terrible for foreign policy,” “the U.S. intelligence community took the president’s remarks as a directive to prioritize spying on the Vatican.”

The CIA, he writes, “has human spies working inside the Holy See bureaucracy.” The NSA and CIA seek to intercept Vatican telecommunications, emails, and texts. The State Department circulates a daily Vatican news digest. The U.S. military maintains a distinct linguistic capability code — “QLE” — for Ecclesiastical Latin.

Klippenstein’s record makes the report difficult to dismiss.

He left The Intercept in April 2024 to build one of the most influential independent newsrooms in American journalism, with more than 200,000 subscribers and a deep bench of national security sources.

His prior reporting includes the leaked FBI report admitting the Bureau had “no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement” in the May 2020 George Floyd protests, the hacked JD Vance opposition dossier the corporate press refused to publish in September 2024, and a steady stream of disclosures about the U.S. national security state that no one else is consistently breaking.

When he writes that “sources tell me” the United States has been spying on the Vatican “for years,” the sentence carries the weight of a journalist whose bombshells routinely survive scrutiny.

The trigger for the new prioritization is now part of the public record. On April 12, in a Truth Social post I covered at the time, Trump called Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” citing the pope’s criticism of the Iran war.

The first American pope, a U.S. citizen by birth, responded the next day with three words: “I am not afraid.”

That a sitting U.S. president has now branded the Bishop of Rome a threat to American interests has no clean precedent in modern American history. The genuine novelty lies in the institutional machinery being aimed downstream of the insult.

In 1944, OSS director William Donovan met privately with Pius XII to lay the groundwork for what would become the longest-running intelligence partnership between Washington and the Holy See.

By the early 1980s, William Casey’s CIA and Pope John Paul II were running a coordinated clandestine operation in support of Solidarność against the Soviet bloc — a partnership that helped collapse an empire and was, for decades, treated by both sides as an alliance of conscience.

Klippenstein is careful to situate the surveillance inside a much wider partnership. He describes “a longstanding — and quietly extensive — relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and the Vatican” that “involves genuine diplomatic, law enforcement, and even cyber security cooperation, all of which serves as both genuine cooperation and convenient cover for collecting intelligence.”

FBI documents he obtained show that the first Trump administration sought coordination with Italian and Vatican officials on cybersecurity, white-collar crime, human trafficking, and art theft, with the Bureau helping the Holy See thwart cyber intrusions and providing threat intelligence to the pope during foreign travels.

The relationship has, in other words, been a real one. That is part of what makes the present moment so disorienting.

Eighty years after Pius XII's meeting with US intelligence services, the alliance has been turned inside out. The president who claims Reagan’s mantle is pointing Reagan’s intelligence services at the Holy See itself, treating the first pope born in the United States as a foreign-policy adversary.

The contractor job posting that put Klippenstein onto the story — an SOS International contract for an Italian-speaking analyst tracking “religion” for an unnamed “U.S. Government Client” — is the small, public artifact of a much larger operational shift.

Klippenstein puts it plainly: “Intelligence collection is rarely a switch that gets flipped; it’s a dial that gets turned up or down depending on where the Washington leadership wants to focus.” Trump inherited the surveillance machinery; the choice of target is his.

As Klippenstein notes, Pope Leo saw this coming. In December, in a speech to the leadership of Italy’s intelligence agencies that almost no American outlet covered, the new pope named the abuse directly.

“In several countries,” Leo said, “the Church is the victim of intelligence services that act for nefarious purposes, oppressing its freedom.”

He called for “strict vigilance” to ensure that “confidential information is not used to intimidate, manipulate, blackmail or discredit politicians, journalists or other civil society actors.”

Read against Klippenstein’s reporting, those words land with new precision.

Leo was naming, in the soft cadence of papal diplomacy, the precise misuse he and his Curia were already enduring — a pattern that, given the long-documented history of intelligence-service surveillance of papal conclaves and Vatican diplomats, has clearly been routine for some time.

Hold this steady in the mind. The leader of one 1.4 billion Catholics, an American by birth, is being treated by his own government as a spy target — and the reason is his moral authority, which Washington now reads as foreign-policy interference. The violation here reaches past foreign sovereignty into conscience itself.

A pope who has called the Iran war unjust and demanded that the good of the Venezuelan people “must prevail over every other consideration” is, in this White House’s view, a problem to be managed by signals intelligence.

To me, it’s simple: either the United States honors a pope’s right to preach the Gospel without being wiretapped, blackmailed, or filed away in a classified daily digest — or it does not. Where do you stand, between the surveillance state and the Vicar of Christ?

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope, a U.S. citizen by birth, and the moral conscience of 1.4 billion Catholics — against an intelligence apparatus that has been quietly aimed at the Holy See and is now being pointed on behalf of a president who treats criticism as treason.

In an era poisoned by surveillance, contempt, and the cynical use of state power against religious leaders, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to be intimidated, manipulated, or filed away in a classified daily digest.

We believe the freedom of the Church is the freedom of conscience itself, and that no government — not even our own — has the right to wiretap the global leader of the Catholic Church.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for moral clarity in a moment when the spy agency reports to a man who calls the pope weak. Standing with Pope Leo is the simplest expression of Catholic loyalty in a country whose government has decided that the Vicar of Christ is an intelligence target.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an administration that treats the Bishop of Rome as a foreign adversary — I am asking you to join us.

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

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

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

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

Paid subscribers get the deeper work — the biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, the ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, our Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, and the archive of the essays that built this community. Your support is what makes all of it possible.

Whether you give $0, $10, $100, $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 stood in the aisle of his return flight from Malabo to Rome on Wednesday and told reporters what he has been telling the world since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran in June: “As a Church — I repeat — as a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war.”

The line came roughly twenty minutes into a wide-ranging in-flight press conference at the close of his apostolic journey through four African nations — Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Equatorial Guinea — that he described as “a blessing.” Five of the seventy traveling journalists asked questions.

Leo addressed the war in Iran and the diplomatic chaos surrounding it, the global crisis of migration, the death penalty, the Vatican’s relationships with authoritarian regimes, and — for the first time in such pointed terms — the place of sexual ethics in the Church’s broader moral witness.

He moved from issue to issue with the calm of a man who has spent eleven months being pulled in every direction by global pressure and has arrived at the Gospel as his fixed point.

The opening question came from Tg1’s Ignazio Ingrao, who pressed Leo on whether he hopes for regime change in Iran. Leo refused the bait. “The issue is not whether there is regime change or not,” he said. “The issue is how to promote the values we believe in without the death of so many innocent people.”

He kept returning to that frame all flight long. There was no taking gotcha questions about who should rule Tehran or whether NATO should escalate. The argument he was willing to make was the general one — the protection of innocent life — and the conclusions about which leaders have failed it were left to the people listening.

During the flight, he named the dead. The letter we published Sunday from the parents of the Minab schoolchildren killed in the United States bombing of Iran came up by name.

He said he had seen the letter, and it affected him deeply: “I have just seen a letter from families of children who were killed on the first day of the attack. They speak about how they have lost their children, who died in that event.”

He also told reporters of a photograph he carries with him of a young Muslim boy who held up a sign welcoming him to Lebanon last November. He said the boy was killed during the Israel-Lebanon War, although some independent observers have raised questions about the circumstances of his death.

Either way, Leo’s instinct was unmistakable. He keeps the photograph close, and the argument it makes carries on its own.

This is the same pope who two weeks ago called Trump’s threat to destroy the civilization of Iran “unacceptable,” who told American Catholics to call their congressmen, who said the “delusion of omnipotence” governing the world’s nuclear powers must end.

Pressure from Washington has come in many forms since then. He has not stepped back from any of it — not Iran, not Israel, not the larger drumbeat for war.

He told the reporters in the matter-of-fact voice he has used since his first homily as Bishop of Rome that he condemns capital punishment everywhere it is practiced. The executions Iran’s regime carried out this very morning of opposition members fall under that condemnation.

“I condemn all actions that are unjust,” he said. “I condemn the taking of people’s lives. I condemn capital punishment. I believe that human life is to be respected.”

The exchange on migration was where the theology cut deepest. Eva Fernández of Radio Cope asked Leo what message he had for Spanish Catholics divided on the subject. Leo answered her in Spanish, and his answer was a question.

What is the Global North doing to help the Global South, or those countries where young people today cannot find a future and therefore dream of moving north?

He went on. Africa, he said, is too often treated as a place from which to extract minerals for the benefit of richer countries. The richer countries then build walls against the people whose homelands they have hollowed out. Leo acknowledged that states have the right to regulate their borders.

He insisted, in the same breath, that the human being who arrives at the border is a human being, owed the dignity that belongs to every human being. The work of justice, he argued, has to begin upstream — in the wealthy economies that benefit from the underdevelopment they refuse to address.

It is the root-causes argument that Catholic social teaching has made for generations. It is also the argument the Trump administration most wants the Church to abandon.

When Paris Match’s Arthur Herlin asked whether Leo’s presence beside authoritarian heads of state risks lending them moral cover — “pope-washing,” in his phrase — the pope answered in English.

He spoke about the long, patient work of Vatican diplomacy with regimes the Holy See finds repugnant: quiet channels that secure the release of political prisoners, food and medicine that move without press releases, lines of communication kept open so the Gospel can press against the hardest places.

The answer was a defense of presence as moral practice — the conviction that the Church accompanies suffering rather than scolds it from a safe distance.

Then came the question on same-sex blessings. Verena Stefanie Schälter of ARD asked Leo how he intends to preserve unity after Cardinal Reinhardt Marx of Munich gave permission earlier this year for the blessing of same-sex couples in his archdiocese. Leo answered carefully.

The Holy See, he said, still does not agree with the formalized blessings the German bishops authorized; Francis’s 2023 provision in Fiducia Supplicans remains the floor. The disagreement is real, and Leo did not pretend otherwise. But he chose to spend most of his answer on something else.

I think it’s very important to understand that the unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.

He has not put it this plainly before. The thesis has organized his entire pontificate: the Church’s moral imagination has been too long captive to the bedroom and not nearly attentive enough to the battlefield, the border, and the executioner’s chamber.

In his own way, he is picking up the appeal Pope Francis made in his first interview in 2013, where Francis said the Church could not be “obsessed” with abortion, contraception, and gay marriage at the expense of the broader Gospel.

By any honest count, Leo has spoken about war and migration at a ratio of at least a hundred to one against abortion and same-sex marriage. In eleven months as pope, he has yet to publicly mention contraception. I plan to write more about this in the coming days, because it appears to be his settled approach to the most divisive questions in Catholic life.

There is a name for what Leo did on that plane. The American Cardinal Joseph Bernardin called it the seamless garment — a single ethic of life that runs from the womb to the migrant boat to the death row cell to the cluster bomb.

Bernardin’s vision was eclipsed for two generations by an American Church that decided some lives were worth more political energy than others. Leo, a son of that same Church, has spent his pontificate stitching the garment back together.

In his pocket is a photograph of a Lebanese boy. When a Spanish reporter pressed him on migration, he turned the question around — Madrid, Brussels, and Washington had to answer first.

For Leo XIV, the executions Iran’s regime carried out this morning, the airstrikes that orphaned children in southern Lebanon, and the degradations of human dignity unfolding across the globe all belong to the same wound — the wound Bernardin named.

He intends to work to heal the whole of it.

I will have more analysis in the coming days. For now, I’ll leave you with a transcript and video of his own words.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who refuse to accept that the protection of human life is a partisan position.

We stand with the parents of the Minab schoolchildren, with the families in southern Lebanon burying their dead, with the young people of Africa who deserve a future at home, and with everyone who believes that the Gospel still has something to say when the world’s most powerful governments choose violence over justice.

In an age that wants the Church to be quiet about war and loud only about the bedroom, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and right now, as American power is once again being used to kill children in their classrooms and worshippers in their villages, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the politics of war and cruelty — I am asking you to join us this Easter season.

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

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

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

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

Paid subscribers get the deeper work — the biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, the ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, our Sunday Scripture Reflection Series, and the archive of the essays that built this community. Your support is what makes all of it possible.

Whether you give $0, 5, $50, $500, 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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Full Transcript: Pope Leo XIV’s In-Flight Press Conference, Malabo to Rome

Source: Vatican News. Working English transcription and translation.

Pope Leo XIV: “Good day, everyone. I hope you are well, that you are ready for another journey. With fully recharged batteries already!”

[Pope Leo XIV, in Italian:] When I travel, I speak for myself, but today as Pope, Bishop of Rome, it is above all a pastoral Apostolic Journey to meet, accompany, and get to know the People of God.

Very often the interest expressed is more political: ‘What does the Pope say about this or that issue? Why doesn’t he judge the government in one country or another?’ And there are certainly many things to say. I have spoken about justice, and those issues are there.

But that is not the first word: the journey should be understood above all as an expression of the desire to proclaim the Gospel, to announce the message of Jesus Christ, which is a way of drawing close to the people in their happiness, in the depth of their faith, but also in their suffering.

There, it is clear that very often it is necessary to make comments or to look for ways to encourage people themselves to take responsibility for their lives. It is also important to speak with Heads of State, to encourage a change of mindset or greater openness to thinking about the common good, and to consider issues such as the distribution of a country’s resources. In the talks we had, we did a bit of everything, but above all we saw and met the people with this enthusiasm.

I am very happy with the whole journey, but living, accompanying, and walking with the people of Equatorial Guinea was truly a blessing, with the rain… They were happy with the rain the other day, but above all it was a sign of sharing with the universal Church what we celebrate in our faith.

Ignazio Ingrao (Tg1): Your Holiness, thank you for this journey rich in encounters, stories, and faces. At the peace meeting in Bamenda, Cameroon, you described an upside-down world where a handful of tyrants risk destroying the planet. Peace, you said, must not be invented but welcomed. Negotiations over the Iran conflict are in chaos, with heavy effects on the global economy. Do you hope for regime change in Iran, given that civil society and students also took to the streets in recent months, and there is global concern about the nuclear race? What appeal do you make to the United States, Iran, and Israel to break the deadlock and stop the escalation? And should NATO and Europe be more involved?

[Pope Leo XIV, in Italian:] I would like to begin by saying that we must promote a new attitude and a culture of peace. Very often, when we assess certain situations, the immediate response is that we must go in with violence, with war, with attacks.

What we have seen is that many innocent people have died. I have just seen a letter from families of children who were killed on the first day of the attack. They speak about how they have lost their children, who died in that event. The issue is not whether there is regime change or not; the issue is how to promote the values we believe in without the death of so many innocent people.

The situation in Iran is clearly very complex. Even the negotiations themselves — one day Iran says yes and the United States says no, and vice versa — and we do not know where things are heading. This chaotic, critical situation for the global economy has been created, but there is also an entire population in Iran of innocent people suffering because of this war. So, on regime change, yes or no: it is not even clear what regime currently exists after the first days of attacks by Israel and the United States on Iran.

Rather, I would encourage the continuation of dialogue for peace, that all sides make every effort to promote peace, remove the threat of war, and respect international law. It is very important that innocent people are protected, as has not happened in several places.

I carry with me a photo of a Muslim child who, during the visit to Lebanon, was waiting there with a sign saying “Welcome Pope Leo.” He has been killed in this final phase of the war. There are many human situations, and I think we must be able to think in these terms.

As a Church — I repeat — as a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war. And I would like to encourage everyone to make efforts to seek answers that come from a culture of peace, not hatred and division.

Eva Fernández (Radio Cope): We are leaving a continent where many people desire and dream of traveling to Europe. Your next trip will be to Spain, where the migration issue is very important, especially in the Canary Islands. You know that migration in Spain generates great debate and polarization; even among Catholics there is no clear position. What can we say to Spaniards, and in particular to Catholics, about immigration? And, if you’ll allow me: the next trip will be to Spain, but we know you also wish to travel to Peru, and perhaps to Argentina and Uruguay, and perhaps also to greet Our Lady of Guadalupe?

[Pope Leo XIV, in Spanish:] The issue of migration is very complex and affects many countries, not only Spain, not only Europe, not only the United States; it is a global phenomenon.

So, my answer begins with a question: what is the Global North doing to help the Global South, or those countries where young people today cannot find a future and therefore dream of moving north? Everyone wants to go north, but often the North has no answers on how to offer them opportunities. Many suffer… The issue of human trafficking is also part of migration.

Personally, I believe that a State has the right to regulate its borders. I am not saying that everyone must be allowed to enter without order, sometimes creating in destination countries situations more unjust than those they left behind. But that said, I ask myself: what are we doing in richer countries to change the situation in poorer countries? Why can we not try, both through state aid and through the investments of large wealthy companies and multinationals, to change the situation in countries like those we visited on this visit?

Africa is often seen by many as a place to extract minerals, to take its wealth for the benefit of other countries. Perhaps globally we should work more to promote greater justice, equality, and development in these African countries so that people do not need to emigrate to other countries, including Spain, and so on.

And another point I would like to make is that, in any case, they are human beings, and we must treat human beings humanely, not treat them worse than animals, as often happens. It is a very big challenge: a country can say it cannot receive more than a certain number of people, but when people arrive, they are human beings and deserve the respect that belongs to every human being because of their dignity.

Q: And the next journeys?

I have a strong desire to visit several countries in Latin America. So far, nothing is confirmed; we will wait and see.

Arthur Herlin (Paris Match): Holy Father, thank you very much in the name of all my French colleagues for that amazing trip. It was wonderful. Holy Father, during this trip, you met leaders among the most authoritarian in the world, right? How can you prevent your presence from lending moral authority to these regimes? Isn’t it a kind of let’s say, ‘pope-washing’?

[Pope Leo XIV, in English:] Thank you for the question. Certainly, the presence of a Pope with any Head of State can be interpreted in different ways. It can be interpreted and has been interpreted by some as, “Ah, the Pope or the Church is saying it’s okay that they live like that.” And others may say things differently.

I would go back to something I said in my initial remarks about the importance of understanding the primary purpose of the travel that I do, that the Pope does, to visit the people, and of the great value that the system, that the Holy See continues with, at times, great sacrifice, to maintain diplomatic relations with countries throughout the world. And sometimes we have diplomatic relationships with countries that have authoritarian leaders.

We have the opportunity to speak with them on a diplomatic level, on a formal level. We don’t always make great proclamations — criticizing, judging, or condemning. But there’s an awful lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to promote justice, to promote humanitarian causes, to look for, at times, situations where there may be political prisoners, and finding a way for them to be freed. Situations of hunger, of sickness, etc.

So the Holy See, by maintaining, if you will, a neutrality and looking for ways to continue our positive diplomatic relationship with so many different countries, we’re actually trying to find a way to apply the Gospel to concrete situations so that the lives of people can be improved.

People will interpret the rest of it as they will, but I think it’s important for us to look for the best way that we can to try and help the people of any given country.

Verena Stefanie Schälter (ARD Rundfunk): Holy Father, congratulations on your first papal trip to the Global South. We saw a lot of enthusiasm and even euphoria; I can imagine that was very moving for you as well. I would like to know how you assess the decision of Cardinal Reinhardt Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, that he gave permission to the blessing of same-sex couples in his diocese, and in light of different cultural and theological perspectives, especially in Africa, how do you intend to preserve the unity of the global Church on that particular matter?

[Pope Leo XIV, in English:] First of all, I think it’s very important to understand that the unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue. The Holy See has already spoken to the German bishops.

The Holy See has made it clear that we do not agree with the formalized blessing of couples, in this case, homosexual couples, as you asked, or couples in irregular situations, beyond what was specifically, if you will, allowed for by Pope Francis in saying all people receive blessings.

When a priest gives a blessing at the end of Mass, when the Pope gives a blessing at the end of a large celebration like the one we had today, they are blessings for all people. Francis’ well-known expression ‘Tutti, tutti, tutti’ is an expression of the Church’s belief that all are welcome; all are invited; all are invited to follow Jesus, and all are invited to look for conversion in their lives.

To go beyond that today, I think that the topic can cause more disunity than unity, and that we should look for ways to build our unity upon Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ teaches. So that’s how I would respond to that question.

Anneliese Taggart (Newsmax TV): Holy Father, thank you very much. You have spoken on this trip about how people hunger and thirst for justice. It was just reported this morning that Iran has executed yet another one of the members of the opposition, and this comes as it has been said that the regime has also publicly hanged multiple other people, as well as murdered thousands of its own people. Do you condemn these actions, and do you have any message to the Iranian regime?

[Pope Leo XIV, in English:] I condemn all actions that are unjust. I condemn the taking of people’s lives. I condemn capital punishment. I believe that human life is to be respected and that all people — from conception to natural birth — their lives should be respected and protected.

So when a regime, when a country takes decisions which takes away the lives of other people unjustly, then obviously that is something that should be condemned.

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Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Vatican’s media operation, wants to correct a misunderstanding.

Pope Leo XIV “has not changed,” he told the Washington Post today.

“If one revisits the speeches from his first year as pope, it becomes clear that Leo has always been strong in substance.” Tornielli added: “Certainly, President Trump’s messages and [Leo’s] measured responses have drawn media attention. But this strength in the Pope’s words was there even before; perhaps the media did not always notice it.”

Anyone who has read this publication for the past several months has noticed it.

Across eleven days through Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea — roughly 17,700 kilometers, eighteen flights, homilies delivered in four languages — Pope Leo XIV gave the world a papacy the world has finally been forced to hear.

Whether the pope grew louder or the rest of us finally stopped plugging our ears is a question worth arguing about over coffee. What cannot be argued: the pontiff who stepped onto the tarmac in Malabo last week is no longer being called quiet.

As I told Newsweek recently, “The idea of the ‘quiet Pope Leo’ is a 2025 story. The 2026 Pope Leo is altogether different. He is speaking out, more comfortable in his own skin.”

Letters from Leo exists to connect Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate to our current moment in American politics.

Two threads of the African journey belong especially to that project: his sustained defense of democracy, and his sharpened rhetoric against corruption and authoritarianism. The pope framed both in their African contexts, and told reporters flying from Cameroon to Angola that much of what he said has since been subjected to “commentary on commentary.”

He insisted his speeches be read in light of the audience he addressed. That discipline deserves respect. A harder question follows behind it — how do the same words interrogate us at home?

During the middle of his trip on April 14, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Leo wrote that democracy “remains healthy only when rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person.”

Without that foundation, he warned, democracies collapse into “either a majoritarian tyranny or a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites.”

Power, he added, is not an end but a trust — “true power comes from virtue, not strength.” He wrote those lines for scholars in Rome. The diagnosis applies anywhere a strongman or an oligarch mistakes their own political will for wisdom.

Two days later, in the cathedral of Bamenda — a city inside the heart of Cameroon’s Anglophone war — the pope moved from theological abstraction to direct accusation.

“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants,” he said. He denounced “the masters of war” for spending billions on killing while “the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.”

An Anglophone separatist alliance declared a three-day ceasefire in honor of his visit — the first time it had done so in a conflict that has killed more than 6,500 people and displaced over 650,000 since 2017.

The pope meant those words about that war. He later clarified that “the masters of war” referred to the separatist struggle in front of him, not to any head of state across the Atlantic.

Of course, no homily this pope preaches is sealed off from the wider conscience of the Church. The United States spent more than $916 billion on defense last year while Medicaid, housing assistance, and public schools went wanting. “The masters of war” are not only an ocean away from the White House, the Capitol, or the defense contractors who lobby both.

In Equatorial Guinea, the accusation sharpened again. Leo preached in Mongomo with Teodoro Obiang — the 83-year-old autocrat who has ruled for 47 years — seated before him, along with his son, a convicted French embezzler who serves as vice president of the country.

Before an estimated 100,000 faithful, the pope urged the nation to build a society “capable of engendering a new sense of justice,” to “serve the common good rather than private interests, bridging the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged.”

In a country where oil revenue fills palaces while nearly half the population lives in poverty, that homily functioned as a public indictment, delivered from the altar, with the indicted in the front pew.

At the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, he invoked Augustine — whose ancient Hippo in Annaba had been the pope’s first stop of the trip — and drew a line between the City of God and the earthly “lust for power and worldly glory that leads to destruction.” He warned directly about “the proliferation of armed conflicts” driven by “the exploitation of oil and mineral deposits.”

The next day at Bata Prison, standing in the rain with six hundred inmates, he told officials: “True justice seeks not so much to punish as to help rebuild the lives of victims, offenders, and communities wounded by evil.”

The U.S. State Department has documented torture, extreme overcrowding, and deplorable sanitation inside Equatorial Guinea’s prisons. Leo called those conditions by their name.

Some human rights advocates, including Equatorial Guinean exiles, worried the papal visit would sanitize Obiang’s regime. The concern was not unreasonable. Dictators have extracted photo ops from popes before. Leo’s homilies were the answer. Standing a few feet from the autocrat and his convicted son, the pope refused to soften a single syllable of Catholic social teaching.

A man being co-opted does not preach that way. Leo had claimed the stage for himself and, more importantly, for Christ.

There was also a quieter grace to the trip. In visiting an African church with ties to the slave trade, Leo recalled on his own Afro-Creole heritage — a reminder that the first American pope carries in his own blood the long memory of the continent he came to serve.

When Leo declined to debate the president of the United States, he explained that he came to Africa as a pastor, not as a pundit. The speeches in Bamenda and Mongomo were written weeks before Donald Trump called him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” None of those homilies was drafted with an American politician in mind. And yet the diagnosis fits our politics as it fits any African context.

I have argued from the beginning of this publication that my fervent belief is that just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas to help defeat authoritarianism.

That conviction has only deepened over the past week. Authoritarianism is a global pathology, and Leo treats it as such.

His “handful of tyrants” includes rulers who bomb cities, barons who plunder mines, regimes that cage critics, and majorities willing to turn democracy into a costume worn by oligarchs. The diagnosis belongs to no single continent — it is Catholic, in the oldest sense of the word: universal.

Which is why Americans have work to do. A country that exported Robert Prevost to the Church must refuse to re-import the strongman politics he is rebuking abroad.

Pope Leo XIV is America’s best and most powerful export. We must keep it that way.

If this publication speaks to you, consider joining us for the road ahead.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who see what the pope saw in Africa: that authoritarianism is a global sickness, that the “masters of war” stalk every capital, including our own, and that democracy survives only when rooted in the dignity of the human person.

In an era poisoned by cruelty dressed as strength, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and the witness of this pope, at last heard in full voice, has made that hunger unbearable to ignore.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing with the first American pope against authoritarianism at home and abroad — I am asking you to join us.

If you would like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help this Easter season:

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

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Paid subscribers get the deeper work — the biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, the ongoing Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the archive of the essays that built this community. Your support is what makes all of it possible.

Whether you give $0, 8, $80, $800, 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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The …

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Editor’s note: One year ago today, Pope Francis died at the Casa Santa Marta in Rome. I wrote the essay below for Newsweek …

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Dear friends —

On Sunday morning at the Mass of every parish in the Diocese of Palm Beach — thirteen miles from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — a statement from Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez was read aloud from the pulpit, calling the president’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV “disrespectful and violent” and closing with a direct appeal to pray for the safety of the Holy Father.

Letters from Leo called this moment in December, when Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez to Palm Beach — we told CBS News the new bishop would be “a thorn in the president’s side.”

We’ve spent the past few months tracking the moral confrontation between Pope Leo — and the Gospel of Jesus Christ — and the Trump-Vance administration: the ceasefire demands on Iran, the bomb threat that arrived at the home of the pope’s brother, and an American hierarchy that has split hard over how to answer.

Below, paid subscribers will find the full account of what happened yesterday in Palm Beach — and Bishop Robert Barron’s newest whitewash of the moral atrocity in Iran, posted today from a bishop seated on the president’s own Religious Liberty Commission. Your support makes this work possible.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Rodríguez and every Catholic leader — and every person of goodwill — who refuses to let the Gospel be managed into silence while the Holy Father is attacked by the most powerful politician on earth.

In a country where the president calls the pope “WEAK on Crime,” strips Catholic charities of $11 million amid his feud with Rome, and counts on the American hierarchy to look the other way, the need for a Catholic voice willing to tell the truth has never been more urgent.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because American Catholics are hungry for something deeper than silence from the pulpit and theological cover for a White House in an unjust war and a one-sided fight with the Successor of Peter.

They are looking for pastors who will shepherd them, plain truth from the pulpit, and a Church that stands with the pope the Spirit gave us — and right now, with that pope under direct attack from the White House and bishops on the president’s commission softening every blow, that hunger matters more than ever.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity, migrant lives, and the Holy Father against a president who is attacking all three — I am asking you to join us.

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

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

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

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

Paid subscribers also have access to our ongoing series on the biographical life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, the Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the best of our full archive — the essential collection for understanding this moment in the Church and in America.

Whether you give $0, $1, $100, $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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On Sunday morning, across the Diocese of Palm Beach — thirteen miles from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez had the same statement read aloud at the Sunday Mass of every parish in his diocese.

“The Diocese of Palm Beach stands firm with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, and strongly rejects the disrespectful and violent attacks that Donald J. Trump has directed against the Holy Father,” the message read. “These attacks also constitute a grave violation of the religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and, as such, harm the rights of the American Catholic faithful.”

The bishop closed with a single line: “Please pray for the safety of the Holy Father.”

For readers of Letters from Leo, the statement closes a loop.

When Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez the sixth Bishop of Palm Beach last December, we covered the appointment as more than a run-of-the-mill personnel decision. Rodríguez is Dominican-born, came to New York in 2009, and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.

He spent seventeen years pastoring Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, Queens — a parish of 17,000 mostly immigrant faithful — and his team helped families facing ICE deportation long before it was politically useful. We called the appointment exactly what it was: Pope Leo sending a migrant bishop to Mar-a-Lago.

We told CBS News the new bishop would be “a thorn in the president’s side.”

Five months in, the thorn has arrived.

Sunday’s statement followed a week of escalation readers of this movement have tracked in real time. Pope Leo spent most of March and April calling the Iran war a “scandal for humanity” and demanding a ceasefire.

Trump responded on Truth Social, where he branded the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and took credit for the conclave that elected him.

Pope Leo, for his part, told reporters he has “no fear” of the Trump administration. Within seventy-two hours, the White House stripped $11 million from Catholic Charities, and a bomb threat arrived at the home of the Holy Father’s brother in suburban Chicago.

Bishop Rodríguez inherited all of it — a president who had spent the week treating the pope as an enemy, and a diocese that sits at the political center of that enmity. His response was to release a statement read in every parish of Palm Beach and ask Catholics to pray for the pope’s life.

Read the statement again.

It names Trump by name, calls his rhetoric against Pope Leo “violent,” and identifies the constitutional harm at stake — a president attacking the religious leader of the American Catholic Church in a way that collides with the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.

What Bishop Rodríguez asks of his people is simpler and more urgent than any political program: stand with the Holy Father, and we pray for his safety. This is what a bishop is supposed to do when the baptized are being confused about where the Church belongs in a political fight.

Rodríguez did not come to this moment unprepared. His whole priesthood has been a school for it. He spent years accompanying undocumented families, standing at immigration hearings, and defending the dignity of the poor long before any of it was useful to him.

Pope Leo chose a pastor who would not flinch in Florida. When Trump attacked the Holy Father last weekend, the pastor responded at Sunday morning Mass.

He is not alone. Cardinal Blase Cupich joined Cardinal McElroy in calling the Iran war “not morally legitimate.”

At New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Mass, Archbishop Ronald Hicks stood with immigrant families during Trump-Vance ICE raids.

Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski went further still, celebrating Christmas Mass at “Alligator Alcatraz” in open defiance of the president’s detention camps.

What Rodríguez added on Sunday was proximity — a diocese that includes Mar-a-Lago, a rebuke that arrives at the president’s Florida zip code.

At his ordination, a Catholic bishop promises to remain in the unity of the Church under the authority of the successor of Peter. That promise is not decorative.

Defending the person of the pope against public attacks from the most powerful politician on earth is an act of the bond that makes a bishop a bishop, and Rodríguez kept it on Sunday morning in the Diocese of Palm Beach, within a short drive of the president’s Florida home.

With Rodríguez’s message read in every parish of Palm Beach, the only question still facing the American Church is which instinct wins.

Two Ways Forward

Eleven hundred miles northwest of Palm Beach, another American bishop was writing a different kind of message — Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.

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Dear friends,

Letters from Leo is publishing Easter Sunday reflections through Pentecost, available exclusively to paid subscribers.

This series is a quiet walk through the seven weeks of Easter — a season of resurrection, recognition, and the long work of believing that Jesus is alive and among us. These reflections meet the risen Christ in the gospels, in the witness of Pope Leo XIV, and in the broken places of our own lives.

If you want to walk this road with us, you can upgrade below.

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Today’s Readings

That very day, the first day of the week, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. — Luke 24:13–16

The strangest thing about this decade of American life is that a person can love his country, his party, and his Church all at once, and still wake up most mornings feeling quietly exiled from each of them.

That is where I have been much of the past decade. Worn down rather than furious. I often write about this country like a man watching people he loves drift out of reach. The rooms I used to belong to feel different now. The estrangement runs both ways.

Today’s gospel finds two men in the same posture.

They are walking away from Jerusalem with, in Pope Leo XIV’s phrase this morning in Kilamba, “broken and sad hearts.” Leo preached that homily to a hundred thousand people in the plaza of a young African capital.

The disciples are leaving a city of crucifixion. They had hoped Jesus would redeem Israel and are now reckoning with the collapse of that hope. They do not yet know that the stranger at their elbow is the answer to every prayer they have stopped praying.

Leo told the Angolans, who know what it is to walk out of a city ruined by war, that the risen Jesus “walks the path with you and breaks himself as bread for you.” That was the whole of the sermon. Christ finds the disciples on the road they are using to leave.

No one summons them back to Jerusalem first. He is already the stranger at their elbow, asking what they have been talking about and listening as the sun tips toward the horizon.

And then comes the breaking of the bread. And that changes everything. Here’s what I mean.

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The letter opens with a confession: they wrote it with trembling hands.

According to a new report from Iran-based Press TV, parents of 168 children killed in the February 28 U.S. strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in southern Iran have now sent a letter of gratitude to Pope Leo XIV from amidst what they describe as the ashes and ruins of their city.

They call themselves “the fathers and mothers of 168 children who, these days, instead of embracing the warm bodies of our children, press their burned bags and bloody notebooks to our chests.”

The city is Minab, in Hormozgan province, on the Persian Gulf.

Among the dead, by Amnesty International’s count, were at least 110 children between the ages of seven and twelve, along with 26 teachers and four parents who had rushed to the school after the first missile hit and who were killed by the second. Mikail Mirdoraghi was nine.

His grandfather, according to Iran International, said, “Mikail was afraid of the dark. We always slept beside him. I don’t want him to be alone here at night.”

The parents quote three Leo phrases back to him. They thank him for publicly calling on the world’s powers to “reduce the level of violence and bombings.”

Elsewhere, they lean on his insistence that civilians be protected and international humanitarian law respected. The line they have turned into something close to a creed is Leo’s teaching that real peace arrives “not through force and weapons, but through the path of dialogue.”

It makes perfect sense that these parents would see Leo as an ally. Here’s the background that led us to this moment.

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Dear…

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Pope…

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Franc…

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On hi…

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Donal…

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