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Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in recorded history on Friday morning, when SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX and its shares jumped from a $135 listing price to $150 at the opening bell.

The rocket company’s initial public offering raised a record $75 billion and valued SpaceX at roughly $1.77 trillion. Musk’s stake is now worth an estimated $690 billion, and combined with his Tesla holdings, his total fortune crossed $1 trillion, touching $1.18 trillion as the shares climbed through the morning.

Nearly all of it exists on paper, in the equity of companies he controls, and it stands at more than double the wealth of the next-richest person on earth.

Sixteen months before the opening bell, Musk was boasting about a different line of work. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he posted on X in February 2025, days into his blitz through the federal bureaucracy at the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

The agency he was describing ran the largest humanitarian operation on earth. At CPAC three weeks later, Argentine President Javier Milei handed him a red chainsaw engraved “Viva la libertad, carajo,” and Musk hoisted it over his head: “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”

Atul Gawande, the surgeon who led global health at USAID under President Biden, has chronicled what happened next. Stop-work orders landed overnight, with no warning to the governments that depended on American medicine and food. Supplies already sitting in warehouses could not legally reach the people they had been purchased for.

Within weeks, Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had gutted the agency’s staff and killed more than four-fifths of its contracts — and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court stopped them.

Last November, in The New Yorker, Gawande published the arithmetic of the aftermath: the dismantling of USAID had already killed an estimated 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children.

The figure comes from a model built by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols — a deliberately conservative one, which assumes the programs that survived will be fully sustained. Her team has since closed out the count at the one-year horizon: more than 762,000 dead, over 500,000 of them children, lost to pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, AIDS, and hunger.

Pope Leo XIV asked the question that hangs over this milestone nine months before it arrived.

Here’s the background

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Pope Leo XIV landed in Tenerife on Friday morning for the final hours of his weeklong apostolic journey to Spain.

His first stop was the Las Raíces center in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, one of the main migrant reception facilities in the Canary Islands, where more than 54,000 people have been welcomed since 2021.

The pope sat with them and listened to their testimonies. Then he went off-script, switching from Spanish to French and English so the migrants — many from Senegal, Gambia, and Nigeria — could hear him directly in their own languages.

“We are all migrants and pilgrims to our heavenly homeland,” he told them. “Let us help each other to make this journey a more humane place for all.”

The crowd applauded.

From there, Pope Leo moved to the Plaza del Cristo de La Laguna, where he met with local organizations working on migrant integration and heard testimonies from four people whose lives intersected with the migration crisis on these islands.

Khalid Allad, a 24-year-old Moroccan, told the pope he had attempted the Atlantic crossing twice. Twenty people died on the first attempt.

Training with the Don Bosco foundation eventually led to a job at a Salesian school in Tenerife, and Allad said he now goes to work happy each morning.

Mbacke, a Senegalese man speaking for the El Buen Samaritano foundation, recalled being told, “You are worth it. You can.” He also warned that many young migrants face the street the day they turn 18.

After the testimonies, Pope Leo addressed the traffickers.

“Stop. Repent,” he said. Money wrested from the vulnerability of the poor, he warned, would bring neither peace, nor honor, nor a future — and those who profit from the trade in human beings would answer before divine justice. He called on them to free those they held in bondage and to return what they had taken while there was still time.

Leo spoke of two shipwrecks at the center of the crisis. The first happens at sea, in the Atlantic waters between West Africa and the Canary Islands, where the International Organization of Migration has recorded some 6,600 deaths since it began keeping record in 2014 and where the Spanish advocacy group Walking Borders estimates more than 25,000 dead or missing since 2020.

The second shipwreck happens after arrival — being left alone in a foreign city without language, ties, work, or trust.

“Welcome opens the door,” he said. “Integration helps one cross the threshold.”

This distinction — between managing arrivals and rebuilding lives — runs through every major address Leo gave during his seven days in Spain. And his target wasn’t just Spain. It, too, was the United States.

Here’s a rundown.

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“Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity,” Pope Leo XIV said Thursday morning at the port of Arguineguín on the island of Gran Canaria. “You are not just numbers or files. You are people who have left behind families and homes. You have dreams that no one has the right to despise.”

Relief workers call this pier the “dock of shame.” In 2020, more than 2,600 men, women, and children slept here in the open — six times the dock’s capacity — after crossing the Atlantic from West Africa in wooden cayucos and rubber dinghies.

No pope had ever made an apostolic journey to the Canary Islands. Pope Francis told reporters in September 2024 that he wanted to come “because there are situations with migrants arriving by sea,” and the Diocese of Canarias held a signed letter confirming his intention. He died before he could make the trip. On Thursday, his successor finished it for him.

The pope spent the first part of the morning listening. Here’s what he heard.

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It has been a busy spring at Letters from Leo, and the essay that has sat unfinished on the desk the longest is the one trying to keep up with John Prevost.

The pope’s older brother has spent most of April and the first week of May in front of cameras and notebooks.

EWTN News got him first, on April 17, with Augustinian pastor Father Ray Flores, OSA at his side. Three days later, Youna Rivallain came in from Paris for La Croix and met him at his rectory in New Lenox, Illinois. NBC 5’s Mary Ann Ahern brought a camera crew into his living room two days after that.

And on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the conclave, Erin Burnett pulled him onto CNN’s OutFront in primetime.

What follows is the catch-up — twenty things we now know about Pope Leo XIV that we did not know before his older brother started talking.

Here is a glimpse of what is inside.

Pope Leo and John still speak every day. With Louis — the eldest Prevost brother, who lives on Florida’s Gulf Coast and visited President Trump at the White House last May — it is once a week.

Louis has happily told cameras, in his own words, that he is “all MAGA.”

The president of the United States has made the family politics public. “I like his brother Louis much better than I like him,” Trump said last spring, “because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t!”

John talked, in interview after interview, about how the three of them try to get along with Louis despite his politics. The brothers, John kept saying, have decided to refuse to let President Trump get in the way of the love they have for each other.

We learn that the pope answers his own personal email, sometimes between turns of Words With Friends with John on FaceTime.

Father Ray Flores, OSA — the Augustinian pastor of John’s parish, and a close personal friend of both Prevost brothers — confirmed in La Croix that Leo’s Palm Sunday homily, the one that declared God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” was directed personally at Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration.

John, for his part, follows his brother’s papacy mostly by watching the news. And in 1960, the three Prevost boys met Bozo together.

There is a film of it, somewhere, in WGN’s archive.

I went through three television interviews and one print interview, in two languages, to bring you what follows.

Part One — Three Boys in Dolton

1. The Three Prevost Brothers Were on Bozo’s Circus

The biggest reveal of the EWTN interview was almost a throwaway line. John dropped it casually: when he was in third grade, Robert in second, and the eldest, Louis (Marty), in fifth, the three brothers appeared on Bozo’s Circus — the WGN-produced kids’ show that was must-see local television in 1960s Chicago.

Tickets to Bozo were notoriously hard to come by. The brothers got in because a member of the WGN house band taught music at the Catholic school where their father was the superintendent. Their father called in the favor. The boys jumped at it: you would be on TV.

“We were just in the crowd — and then in the grand march at the end where they line everyone up walking out. So you would see him in that. Absolutely.” — John Prevost on EWTN, recalling Bozo’s Circus, c. 1960

If the footage survives in WGN’s archives, somewhere on tape is a film of a six-year-old boy from Dolton walking the grand march of a clown variety show, sixty-five years before he would walk out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s.

2. He Once Fell Through a Roof

John remembered the moment without ceremony. The boys had built a backyard shed out of recycled materials, and the roof was constructed from old doors taken from the house. Some of the wood was already rotting. Robert stepped on the wrong board.

“Rob fell through the roof. It was just part of the wood was rotted. He just does stuff like that.” — John Prevost on EWTN

Other Prevost-brother data points from the same boyhood: when the train crossings on Dolton’s railroad tracks went down for forty-five minutes at a time, certain kids in the neighborhood were known to climb over the parked rail cars to get home. EWTN’s reporter Mark Irons pressed: was that a young Rob? John’s answer: “No comment. Can’t say.”

3. A Neighbor Prophesied It in Second Grade

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Pope Leo XIV stood in Barcelona’s Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium on Tuesday night and told the young people of Spain that “the idolatry of profit and performance” and “the cult of self-image” are “anesthetics designed to numb our conscience and mold it to a certain vision of society.”

The evening prayer vigil closed the fourth day of his apostolic journey through Spain — a trip that has already produced a rebuke of the politics of “weapons and walls” in Madrid and an address to the Spanish parliament on a world “in profound crisis.”

Leo opened the Barcelona leg at midday in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, where he preached on two images: the Church as beloved spouse and the Church as a single body.

“We are strong because we are united, and we are united because we are animated by the same Spirit,” he told the assembly, calling the people of Barcelona and Catalonia to “a special vocation and a responsibility to become, with God’s help, builders of unity.”

In a world torn apart by wars and divisions, he said, Christians must become martyrs in the original sense of the word — “witnesses and prophets of unity, of welcome, of harmony and of peace, even at the cost of sacrifice and renunciation.”

Like the city’s martyr Eulalia, they should be ready “to renounce the superfluous in order to build upon what is essential and lasts forever.”

By nightfall, the renunciation he had in mind acquired names and faces.

Three Testimonies

Three young people stood before the pope in the Olympic Stadium and told their stories: Ferran, baptized this past Easter after years of chasing success that left him empty; Carmina, who survived a suicide attempt after years of silent depression; and Desirée, who grew up in the shadow of her father’s attempt to kill her mother. Leo answered each of them at length.

Ferran told the pope he had grown up hearing that the only goal in life is to produce, to succeed, and to manage his own image. He asked how to keep his eyes on what matters when society pushes him to look down or only at himself.

Leo told him the restlessness he felt was a gift from God. “We are made for the infinite,” the pope said. “That is why every finite horizon, every step, every achievement — while satisfying us — also propels us forward and invites us to keep searching.”

A person who learns to stop, Leo continued in remarks the Vatican has so far published only in Italian and Spanish (translations here are mine), develops “a critical mind toward a social system that does not place the person at the center and that produces injustice and existential poverty at many levels.”

He drew the conclusion himself: “That is why restlessness is frightening — and so is the discovery of interiority, of spirituality, and even more of the Gospel.”

He told the young people what to do about it: “Cultivate moments of silence, perhaps pausing for a few minutes each day to read the Gospel and speak with God.”

Carmina spoke next. She had fought depression in silence for years, and one Friday night, she tried to take her own life. God gave her a second chance, she told the pope, but many others still face that darkness alone. Where can they see God when the darkness is total?

Leo thanked her for the courage it took to speak. Mental health, he said, is increasingly under threat in societies that consider themselves advanced — “a sign that there is something deeply wrong with a certain notion of progress that subjects people to pressures, expectations and tensions that compromise healthy balances.”

Then he pointed her to the cross.

“The cross of Jesus tells us that God does not abandon us, that he is at our side, crucified with us in moments of pain and extreme loneliness.” He also warned believers against tidying up the mystery of suffering: “We must not spiritualize pain, superficially attributing it to ‘God’s will’ or to some mysterious plan of his. God does not want suffering. He carries it with us.”

Desirée grew up in a poor neighborhood of Barcelona. Her father went to prison for trying to kill her mother, social services placed her in a Catholic children’s home at age ten, and there she encountered the love of a family for the first time — and, eventually, baptism. She asked the pope how she could forgive her father, and where God was when she was a child.

“We cannot attribute to God what has been entrusted to our responsibility,” Leo answered. “If violence exists, if selfishness prevails, if even love among family members turns into hatred, we must question the dynamics of our society, the culture of individualism and the temptation of violence — but not God.” Forgiveness, he told her, is a journey rather than a single act, one that begins by asking God to widen the space of love precisely where we have been wounded. “We move forward in small steps toward forgiveness.”

The Economy on Trial

Leo has been making Ferran’s case since the first months of his papacy. In his first formal interview, released last September, he cited projections that Elon Musk would become the world’s first trillionaire and asked what such a milestone reveals: “If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.” CEOs who earned four to six times a worker’s wage sixty years ago, he noted, now earn 600 times as much.

His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, carried that argument into the age of algorithms. Behind all of it stands the judgment Pope Francis rendered in Evangelii Gaudium: “such an economy kills.”

In Barcelona, Leo showed where the casualties fall: in the interior lives of the young, whose restlessness gets anesthetized before it can become a question about God.

American readers will recognize the catechism Ferran described. It is the house religion of hustle culture, preached through productivity metrics and engagement counts, and it forms souls on this side of the Atlantic with particular efficiency.

Pilgrims in the Night

When the testimonies ended, Leo preached on Nicodemus, the Pharisee who came to Jesus under cover of darkness. Every person, the pope said, is a pilgrim in the night: “We are beggars for love; we are truly hungry and thirsty.” The nights of our lives, of the Church, and of society are not signs of failure but “a time of blessing, a place for rebirth, a womb that always gives birth to new life.”

He asked Spain to look honestly at its own nights — its old and new poverties, its social divisions — and to decide what kind of society it wants to build, so that the country “may then be a welcoming space for all, where each person’s dignity is respected and everyone loved for who they are.”

“God does not want anything to be lost,” he concluded. “Even now he desires to give us eternal life and lead us to a happiness that has no end.”

A church that tells a newly baptized young man his restlessness is sacred, a suicide survivor that God hangs on the cross beside her, and a wounded daughter that forgiveness arrives in small steps is offering something no market can price. Leo spent one day in Barcelona insisting that the human person sits at the center of the world’s story, whatever Silicon Valley and Wall Street might say.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the young people of Barcelona — and with everyone who has felt the emptiness of an economy that measures human beings by what they produce. The Gospel insists that every person carries a dignity no balance sheet can capture, and Pope Leo XIV is staking his papacy on that claim.

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 at a moment when profit and performance pose as the meaning of life itself, that hunger has never been more urgent.

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

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Pope Leo XIV walked into Madrid’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Almudena on Monday evening and told the people gathered there to tear down their walls.

He drew the image from the cathedral’s own legend. During a season of persecution, the story goes, an image of the Virgin was sealed inside the wall of Madrid’s ancient citadel, and it was found centuries later, intact, only after part of that wall fell away.

The reunion of a mother and her people became possible, the pope said, precisely because a barrier had come down. The fall of a wall can bring confusion at first, he allowed, and it can also open new possibilities and clear the ground for something to begin again.

Then he turned to the walls of our own moment. Many of them protect no one, Leo told the room. They “divide, separate, and isolate,” and people keep them standing because they would rather not face whatever waits on the other side. “To build something new, beautiful and lasting,” he said, “we must be willing to tear down walls.”

That plea closed a remarkable stretch of days, one that carried the first U.S.-born pope from one enormous Spanish crowd to the next. It is also the through-line I kept hearing across the whole trip, the same builders’ language Leo had been pressing all week in Madrid, where he has rebuked the politics that turns neighbors into threats.

All of it unfolded during the pope’s final hours in a country he had taken by storm — a stretch that would end, of all things, with a private greeting for Bad Bunny.

Here are the details.

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Pope Leo XIV addressed the Spanish parliament on Monday afternoon, the first pope ever to speak from the floor of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid.

When he finished, the chamber rose. The ovation ran nearly seven minutes, and cries of “Long live the pope!” rang off the walls of a legislature in one of Europe’s most secular countries.

Seven hundred guests had gathered under tight security to hear the first American pope speak to Spain’s political class. He gave them a lesson in moral philosophy, albeit in a secular political setting.

The setting carried its own weight. This was the first papal visit to Spain in fifteen years, in a country that has drifted far from the Church and split hard along political lines.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who leads a secular left coalition, sat in the chamber. His government has moved to compensate the victims of clergy abuse, even as it clashes with the bishops on other topics. A pope entering that room could have been received as an intruder, yet Sanchez’s deputies gave him seven minutes on their feet.

Leo built the speech around a single question he traced back five centuries to the University of Salamanca: what conception of the human person inspires a society’s laws, and what kind of society do those laws then build?

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Dear friends,

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

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

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

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Today’s Readings

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” — John 6:51

This morning in Madrid, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass in the Plaza de Cibeles and then carried the Blessed Sacrament in procession through the city. Corpus Christi in Spain spills into the streets: floral carpets, altars built on sidewalks, monstrances that generations of silversmiths labored to perfect.

Leo told the crowd not to mistake any of it for pageantry.

“This is not an exhibition, a remnant of folklore or a simple display of beauty,” he said in his homily. “It is a profession of faith in the presence of the risen Lord, who is alive and continues to walk among us.”

It called to mind another square. On a rainy March evening in 2020, Pope Francis stood alone in an empty St. Peter’s Square and raised the monstrance over a world locked down by the pandemic — a quiet declaration that Christ’s presence reaches even the darkest hours of human history.

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, and the Gospel gives us Jesus at his most scandalous.

“My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”

The crowd quarrels. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus answers by making the claim harder to swallow. The Greek verb John assigns him in these verses, trōgōn, means to gnaw or chew — the word a farmer might use for animals at a trough.

By the end of the passage, no metaphor is left standing.

Catholics stake everything on taking him at his word. We believe that at every Mass, wheat and water and the work of human hands become God. Sit with the strangeness of that.

The maker of two trillion galaxies consents to rest in the palm of a young person’s hand at a Saturday vigil.

That belief carries a consequence we would rather not examine. If God is present in bread, the argument over where God can and cannot show up is finished. It ended in the upper room.

A God humble enough to be chewed has stripped away every excuse for failing to notice him in the rest of our lives — the carpool line, the hospital waiting room, the neighbor whose yard signs make you grit your teeth.

The first reading amplifies this reality.

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Pope Leo XIV celebrated the Solemnity of Corpus Christi in simple white vestments before 1.2 million people in Madrid’s Plaza de Cibeles on Sunday, then carried the Eucharist in a monstrance down Calle de Alcalá, where sixteen floral carpets woven from more than 30,000 carnations covered the pavement.

Local organizers put the crowd at 1.2 million. King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia attended the Mass, and boys and girls who had recently received their first Communion joined the procession behind the monstrance.

In his homily, the pope told Spain that its centuries of Eucharistic devotion must not become “a museum of the past to be visited” but should remain “a school of faith from which to draw even today.” Then he described the curriculum:

A school that teaches us to kneel before God and before our neighbor, because no one can kneel before the Lord and despise their brother; A school that teaches us of the gratitude of love that becomes a gift, so that it may flow among us and break the chains of all selfishness; A school from which we learn that God is a real presence and that we too are called to be present in the realities and challenges of society, not shying away, but personally committing ourselves to the building of the common good.

The pope pressed the point into the streets themselves. The Christ carried through Madrid in the monstrance, he said, “is the same one who identifies with the poor, the downtrodden, those who are alone and forsaken,” and it is “no coincidence” that the Church in Spain has long joined Corpus Christi to its annual Day for Charity.

He also told the crowd what the feast is not. Eucharistic devotion cannot remain “a comfortable, private faith,” Leo said; the procession exists to pull believers “out of our selfishness and indifference” and to make them “builders of a new world.”

The homily reached back to Deuteronomy — “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you” — and warned against “the temptation of trusting in other idols and feeding on bread that does not satisfy.”

Leo closed with St. John of the Cross, who recognized the hidden presence of the Lord while imprisoned in Toledo around Corpus Christi in 1578: “For I know well the spring that flows and runs, although it is night.”

That Eucharistic spring, the pope said, “does not enclose us in private devotion” but “sends us out to refresh our brothers and sisters, our families, the poor, the suffering, and those who have lost hope.”

Sunday was the second day of the pope’s June 6–12 journey through Madrid, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands — the first papal visit to Spain in 15 years.

On Saturday, Leo warned the country’s political class at the Royal Palace against the politics of polarization, visited a Caritas-run center serving Madrid’s homeless, and prayed with hundreds of thousands of young people in the heart of the city, as I reported this weekend.

Sunday’s program also included a private meeting with his Augustinian brothers and a gathering with leaders of Spanish culture, business, and sport at the Movistar Arena, and the journey includes a first-ever papal address to Spain’s parliament.

Leo has been blunt with Spain before. In November, he told the country’s senior bishops that far-right ideology is the gravest threat facing the nation’s social cohesion, and that far-right forces “seek to win the Catholic vote” while instrumentalizing the Church for partisan ends.

The Spanish bishops’ conference has disputed that characterization, saying the pope spoke about “the risks of subordinating faith to ideologies without mentioning any specific group.”

But the National Catholic Reporter noted ahead of this trip that the Spanish Catholic magazine Vida Nueva confirmed through its own sources that Leo warned the bishops about Vox by name. The record of that meeting remains contested.

Kneeling before God and the poor has a history of importance in this papacy. Here’s what I mean.

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Pope Leo XIV stood in the Royal Palace of Madrid on Saturday and told Spain’s assembled leadership that “the temptation to gain popularity by fanning the flames of polarization seems to have grown rather than diminished, and human dignity continues to be violated.”

Seated in the audience was Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, Spain’s far-right party. When the pope finished, Abascal rose with the rest of the room and applauded.

The American pope landed at Madrid’s Barajas airport at 10:30 in the morning, where King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez welcomed him. No pope had set foot in Spain in 15 years.

The Royal Palace address — delivered before some 300 state authorities, religious leaders, and diplomats after a 21-gun salute — opened a journey that runs through June 12 with stops in Madrid, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands, where Leo will meet with migrants and the organizations that serve them.

The pope asked the Spanish people to lay down the stories they tell against one another. Here is the heart of the speech:

“For the love of truth, I invite everyone to set aside the divisive and polarizing narratives of your societal reality and history, so as to overcome sterile simplifications through the fruitful appreciation of complexity.”

He was speaking to a nation in genuine distress. Sánchez has governed since 2018 atop a fragile coalition now battered by corruption scandals, and the opposition Popular Party and Vox are demanding his resignation ahead of elections due next year.

Migration sits at the center of the fight.

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Pope Leo XIV declared aboard the papal flight to Madrid on Saturday that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.”

The theory itself, he told the more than eighty journalists traveling with him, “dates back to centuries when it was impossible to imagine the weapons and the destructive capacity available to humanity today.”

The question came from Franca Giansoldati, the veteran Vatican correspondent of Il Messaggero, during the pope’s customary visit to the press section at the back of the plane.

Claire Giangravè of Religion News Service, traveling aboard, rendered the answer this way in her dispatch from the cabin:

“I think this has already been made very clear: the notion of a just war no longer applies. The problem is that just war theory developed in centuries when no one could have imagined the weapons we have today or humanity’s capacity for destruction.”

The Vatican’s official English translation confines the first clause to Iran. The second sentence is about the theory itself — a body of teaching that, by the pope’s own account, belongs to an age that could not conceive of what human beings can now do to one another.

He was effectively quoting himself. In Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical he published on May 25, Leo wrote in paragraph 192:

“Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”

Humanity, the encyclical argues, “possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”

The timing itself is important.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals, circulated a letter on June 3 formally convening an extraordinary consistory — a summit of the world’s cardinals — for June 26 and 27 in Rome.

Edgar Beltrán reported at The Pillar that the consistory’s second session is devoted to chapter 5 of the encyclical, paragraphs 182 through 192, and that the cardinals will take up paragraph 192’s call to rethink just war doctrine in greater detail.

The doctrine is formally on the docket. Three weeks before his cardinals gather to debate it, the pope stood in an airplane aisle and gave the press corps a framing for understanding the question.

It is an extraordinary thing to say in a casual exchange with reporters. A tradition carried since Augustine usually moves on the Church’s slowest clocks — though Pope Francis proved on the 2013 flight home from Rio de Janeiro, with five words about gay priests, that an airborne press conference can bend the whole story overnight.

The Vatican-watcher account Catholic Sat posted within hours: “Pope just dropped the biggest change in Church teaching in a very long time, and he did so mid-flight.”

To understand why Leo is doing this, it’s important to look at who has been wielding the doctrine in recent history

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The Vatican confirmed on Friday that Pope Leo XIV will meet privately with victims of clergy sexual abuse during his weeklong pilgrimage to Spain, which begins Saturday and runs through June 12.

The encounter was organized by the Spanish Church, and the Vatican says details will be released only after it concludes — a standard practice meant to protect the privacy of the survivors in the room. The meeting does not yet appear on the trip’s official program.

According to the Associated Press, Spain’s government and its bishops’ conference approved a new reparations program for abuse survivors in the months before the visit — an answer, years in the making, to the 2023 report from Spain’s human rights ombudsman that estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of clergy abuse across decades.

Leo has made three earlier trips outside Italy, and he is not known to have met with survivors on any of them.

The itinerary runs from Madrid to the monastery of Montserrat to Barcelona, where Leo will inaugurate the newest tower of the Sagrada Família, before ending in the Canary Islands among migrants who survived the Atlantic crossing.

The trip — Leo’s first major European pilgrimage — comes four months after the Spanish daily El País reported that the pope had told Spain’s bishops that far-right ideology is the country’s biggest threat.

The bishops’ conference afterward contested that report, saying the pope had spoken about the risks of subjecting faith to ideologies without naming any group.

Spain is also the country where the Church’s newest abuse reckoning was born. Josemaría Escrivá founded Opus Dei in Madrid in 1928, and the movement grew from a Spanish student apostolate into a global power with banks, universities, and — according to the British investigative journalist Gareth Gore — a decades-long pipeline of underage girls recruited from poor families to cook and clean without pay as so-called numerary assistants.

Gore’s 2024 book Opus documents women who were cut off from their families, moved across borders, and — according to interviews Gore conducted — treated with sedatives and antidepressants. Argentine prosecutors, after a two-year investigation built on the testimony of 43 women, found grounds to bring charges against senior Opus Dei figures for human trafficking and labor exploitation.

Readers of Letters from Leo know what came next.

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Cardinal Robert McElroy removed Monsignor Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington on Wednesday and ended all affiliation between the archdiocese and the Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, the Washington-based nonprofit Rossetti leads.

In a statement released June 3, the cardinal said that “statements made by Monsignor Rossetti linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”

The breaking point came on May 29, when Rossetti posted a YouTube video sharing his personal belief that “many, if not most, [UFO] sightings are, in fact, demons.” Such entities, he said in the video, “can do things that we can’t do, such [as] the speed and all sorts of things that human beings can’t do.”

According to the National Catholic Register, the video had been marked private by the time the news broke on Wednesday.

Through my own digging, I can tell you the story runs deeper than the press release.

Two independent sources tell me the concerns inside the Archdiocese of Washington go beyond the UFO commentary the cardinal cited publicly. McElroy’s statement gestures in this direction without elaborating — it names the Center’s “recent use of social media” as a problem in its own right, alongside the video.

Separate from those two sources, Father Phillip Brown — the Sulpician president-rector of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, the oldest Catholic seminary in the United States — provided Letters from Leo a statement about what is at stake when exorcists go public.

“I do think it’s problematical for a priest, but especially a priest who has been given the faculty of performing exorcisms, to speak out publicly about it and enter into these public discussions of exorcism, or to reveal specifics about exorcisms that they have participated in.”

Brown said exorcists who publicize their experiences “can contribute to a kind of public or individual hysteria which actually undermines the Church’s efforts to combat Satan, demons, and demonic forces.” He connected the concern to the pope’s own warnings about clerical fame:

“What is also of concern, as Pope Leo has pointed out, is clerics seeking celebrity and building a public image around the celebrity status they attain.

“I have long had concerns about exorcists who draw so much attention to the subject of evil and the demonic, and in doing so draw attention to themselves — it seems sometimes to be a lot more about the celebrity they are seeking than any real concern or contribution to calming peoples’ fears about evil and demonic forces and helping them to overcome those forces.

“There is a natural fascination with evil that can easily become prurient and voyeuristic.”

Rossetti is no fringe figure. A priest of the Diocese of Syracuse and a licensed psychologist with a doctorate from Boston College, he led the St. Luke Institute, a psychological treatment center for Catholic clergy, from 1996 to 2009, and he has taught pastoral studies at the Catholic University of America.

He served as Washington’s exorcist for 19 years. His 2021 book “Diary of an American Exorcist” and his steady stream of dispatches from the world of deliverance ministry made him one of the best-known exorcists in the country.

Rossetti responded within hours. Here’s what he said, as reported by the Register:

“I ask forgiveness for any ways that I have not been faithful to the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium, particularly in the cited video on ‘aliens and the demonic.’ I believe it is of the utmost importance to be obedient to the Church and I will continue to endeavor to subject all that I do and the Center to be thus obedient.”

He thanked the archdiocese for 19 years of support and promised that the Saint Michael Center, which plans to continue its ministry elsewhere, would keep the cardinal in its prayers.

That response is a healthy sign. Anyone who has followed the recent history of celebrity priests in America knows that humility has rarely been the reflex when a bishop steps in.

McElroy, for his part, has spent his Washington tenure governing with this kind of directness. He led the Church’s outcry after the Trump-Vance administration’s ICE killings in January, and he has emerged as one of Pope Leo XIV’s closest American allies.

The deeper story is the rise of the celebrity exorcist — the priest whose ministry of deliverance becomes a media brand, complete with podcasts, conferences, book deals, and donor lists.

Catholic teaching on the demonic is precise, and the Church practices that ministry quietly: exorcism is surrounded by discretion, psychological screening, and the direct oversight of the local bishop. The celebrity version trades discretion for content.

Mike Lewis, the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is, has spent years documenting what happens when that trade gets made.

His September 2024 investigation of Father Chad Ripperger — “perhaps the world’s most famous living exorcist following the 2016 death of Father Gabriel Amorth,” as Lewis describes him — remains the definitive portrait of the genre.

Lewis documented how Ripperger’s traditionalist society offers a five-day workshop that trains priests to become exorcists for a $4,750 fee, and how Ripperger has claimed that bipolar disorder is really “demonic obsession” — a claim Lewis warned “could lead to dangerous outcomes, such as patients discontinuing their medication without medical supervision.”

His portrait of the celebrity exorcist’s media routine is worth quoting at length:

“He assures his audience that demons are boring, and what really interests him is the spiritual conversion of his subject or the intercession of Our Lady. He will then spend the rest of the interview talking all about what the demons do and what they tell him.”

Lewis closes that investigation by asking why a priest with “an international platform to spread his dangerous views” is allowed to operate with no meaningful oversight at all.

The pattern runs past Ripperger. Here’s some background.

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On Wednesday night in Washington, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia opened the Washington AI Network’s annual AI Honors gala with the greetings of Pope Leo XIV and a prayer drawn from the prophet Micah.

The second annual dinner honored seven American leaders in artificial intelligence, with more than 400 leaders from government, tech, and academia in their seats.

The Washington AI Network has earned its reputation as the great convener of this town’s artificial-intelligence conversation — the room where the industry’s builders, its regulators, and its chroniclers actually meet. Putting the Catholic Church at the head of the evening struck me as both cutting-edge and indicative of the years to come.

“Last year, we were proud to honor Pope Francis’ AI advisor for his work elevating this important issue,” Tammy Haddad, the network’s founder and CEO, said in a statement to Letters from Leo.

“Pope Leo’s new encyclical and the papal nuncio’s remarks tonight remind us that the center of all technology is the human person. Their leadership helps keep the policy conversation focused on what matters most — the ways AI can be used to advance and protect humanity.”

Caccia, whom Pope Leo named his new apostolic nuncio to the United States in March, spoke before anyone raised a glass. Here is how the pope’s ambassador framed the evening:

This gathering itself represents something that Pope Leo calls for in his recent encyclical entitled Magnifica Humanitas, a shared document involving many sectors of society. The future of this technology cannot be guided by one field alone. It needs science and policy, business and public service, ethics and fait

He asked the room to keep the human person at the center of every choice — from the first day of development, he said, and at every stage that follows.

Then he prayed over the dinner, invoking Micah’s call to do justice, to love goodness, and to walk humbly with God, and asked that nothing built by the hands in that room ever “diminish the grandeur of the human person.”

I found it incredibly consoling to watch the Vatican’s man in Washington begin the industry’s biggest night by framing every achievement in the room as answerable to human dignity. The titans of industry heard a moral claim before they heard a single toast.

The encyclical Caccia invoked needs little introduction for readers here.

Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Leo’s pontificate, landed on May 25 with a demand that artificial intelligence be disarmed and a warning that technology “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” Silicon Valley spent the following week in a defensive crouch.

(I have been tracking this story from the beginning in the Pope Leo Challenges Silicon Valley series.)

The encyclical is winning a hearing on Capitol Hill as well. “Pope Leo XIV is a thoughtful, serious, and inspired moral force whose voice transcends politics,” Congressman Tom Suozzi — the Catholic Democrat from New York who attended Leo’s inauguration in Rome — told Letters from Leo.

“His leadership is encouraging policymakers to think not just about what we can do, but what we must do to protect human dignity in the face of this cataclysmic economic and technological change.”

Whether that teaching reaches the people who write American AI policy matters more than any viral moment. The early evidence says it already has. Here’s what’s happened in the past ten days alone.

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Update — June 8, 2026: Spike Lee has confirmed he will wear the Pope Leo XIV jersey courtside tonight at Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals — the number 14 Knicks jersey the pope signed for him at the Vatican. (Yahoo Sports has the details.)

Game 1 of the NBA Finals just finished last night, with the New York Knicks winning and now playing for a championship for the first time since 1999, chasing their first title since 1973.

Three of the men who carried them there learned the game at the same small Catholic university outside Philadelphia. Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges all wore Villanova blue before they pulled on Knicks orange, the heart of a roster New York has nicknamed the “Nova Knicks.”

The most famous Villanova graduate in the world is likely watching from Rome.

Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost in the Chicago suburb of Dolton and a member of the Villanova Class of 1977, is, according to Spike Lee, a Knicks fan.

Lee made the claim after meeting the pope at the Vatican on November 15, 2025, when Leo gathered the film world for an audience on the power of cinema alongside Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, and Viggo Mortensen.

The director handed Leo a custom jersey reading “Pope Leo” above the number 14, and said he asked the Holy Father for a miracle: a championship for New York.

Seven months later, with the Knicks three wins from the title, the request stopped sounding like a punch line.

Knicks supporters have found their own evidence. Here’s the latest.

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The numbers landed this morning, and they tell a story Donald Trump did not want told.

In a new Economist/YouGov poll conducted from May 29 to June 1, 55 percent of Americans say they hold a favorable opinion of Pope Leo XIV, against 23 percent who view him unfavorably. That is a net rating of plus thirty-two in a country that agrees on almost nothing, including the color of the sky

Set those figures beside the president’s.

Trump draws a favorable opinion from just 37 percent of the same respondents, while 59 percent view him unfavorably — a net of minus twenty-two.

Put the two side by side and the pope sits fifty-four points ahead of the man in the Oval Office on net favorability, a chasm between a leader Americans trust and one most of them have written off.

This is the pope Trump has spent two months trying to tear down.

I want to walk through the breakdown, because the partisan numbers are where this gets interesting.

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On Tuesday, Pope Leo XIV named Maria Montserrat Alvarado — a Mexican-American known to nearly everyone as Montse — to lead the Dicastery for Communication.

She becomes the first woman ever to hold the post. When she takes over on November 1, she will oversee every outlet the Holy See runs: the press office, Vatican News, Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore Romano, the publishing house, and the whole apparatus that carries the pope’s voice to the world.

Here is the part that matters most — and the part that will surprise readers of this newsletter who have spent years wary of the network she comes from.

For the last three years, Montse Alvarado ran EWTN News. She spent those years pulling it toward the kind of honest journalism the Church actually needs.

That sentence deserves some explanation, because a lot of you have a long memory when it comes to EWTN, and for good reason.

Founded by Mother Angelica from a garage in Alabama, EWTN grew into the largest Catholic media organization in the world: eleven television channels, programming in multiple languages, more than 400 million households across 160 countries.

For much of the last decade, a loud faction of that programming — led by the commentator Raymond Arroyo — treated Pope Francis as an opponent to be managed rather than a shepherd to be served. Arroyo has continued that shtick into the Leo pontificate.

Francis noticed. In 2021, he told suggested that the network was doing “the work of the devil” in a Catholic outlet that claimed to love the Church while tearing down the man chosen to lead it.

That is the EWTN many of you remember. It is not the EWTN that Montse Alvarado hands off this fall.

Here’s the backstory.

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Last week, Bishop Robert Barron told the Washington Post’s Adam O’Neal that he hates “the tribalism” of online Catholicism — “the scapegoating mobs,” “this goofy us against them,” “liberal conservative Catholics in their little teams.” He claimed he had “scolded my own audience” against character assassination.

“I hate all that,” the bishop of Winona-Rochester said.

Unfortunately, Barron’s words don’t match his own behavior. Consider this bombastic tweet from less than a year ago.

By the standard he set with Adam O’Neal, he has spent the past year personifying the very behavior he claims to disdain.

In an interview with Fox News, Barron praised border czar Tom Homan — accused of taking a $50,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents stuffed in a Cava restaurant bag before Trump appointed him — as a Catholic who “spoke with great passion” on a White House call about immigration, parroting Homan’s framing on child trafficking.

The same Tom Homan declared from outside the White House that “the Catholic Church is wrong” on immigration, mockingly invited the Holy Father on an ICE ride-along, and said he would “educate” the pope on Catholic teaching. Barron has said nothing about any of it.

The same Tom Homan has called Pope Leo XIV “a tool of our enemies”, mockingly invited the Holy Father on an ICE raid, and said he would “educate” the pope on Catholic teaching. Barron has said nothing about any of it.

The pattern follows a year of escalating partisan provocations dressed up as theology. In February, Barron praised Marco Rubio’s Munich speech as a defense of Western civilization’s Christian soul, then accused Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of running the “Marxist playbook” for daring to push back.

Vatican officials began an informal review of his conduct in the weeks that followed, as Letters from Leo first reported.

Two revelatory moments stood out to me in particular in the latest interviews.

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Dear friends —

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

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Today’s Readings

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” — 2 Corinthians 13:13

There is a man named Nicodemus, and he comes to Jesus at night.

He is a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin who has spent his life studying the law. None of his learning explains what he has come to ask.

The question, when he finally puts it to Jesus, is the one a person asks only after he has lived enough life to know he needs a new one: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

Jesus offers him the only answer that has ever sufficed for any of us: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The Church gathers and confesses, again, that the deepest reality of God — the inner life that makes God God — is communion. Father, Son, Spirit. Three Persons — one self-giving love.

Simply put, the deepest identity of God is that God is love.

That is the whole faith in one sentence. The councils, the catechism, the magisterium — and all of it is commentary.

This past week, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity” — on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. If you have not read it, I encourage you to set aside some time this week. It belongs in the same family as Rerum Novarum and Laudato Si’.

Leo’s diagnosis is precise. Humanity, he writes, is facing “a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” The Babel of our moment is data centers and server farms — a global race to build something that can outthink us and, in time, perform the surface forms of friendship, advice, empathy, and even love.

Leo names what is at stake. Human dignity faces “new forms of dehumanization,” and what we are tempted to surrender is “the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.

True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”

A few weeks ago, Fareed Zakaria gave a commencement address at Bard that, without quite knowing it, was about the same thing.

The human brain weighs about three pounds, he said. It runs on twenty watts, roughly the power of a dim refrigerator bulb. The most advanced AI systems consume hundreds of millions of watts across hundreds of acres of cooling and cable. Yet a toddler still beats the machine. A child reads a room, senses tension in silence, knows when a parent is lying about being fine.

“The danger in the AI age,” Zakaria said, “is not that machines will become too human. It is that humans will start trying to become too much like machines.”

Today’s readings illuminate that fear.

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On Thursday morning at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV met with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — and the American pope lit up.

Photographs from the audience show Leo grinning, leaning in, openly delighted in a way he rarely is in his diplomatic photo lines with heads of state. Johnson is the mayor of Leo’s hometown, a South Side kid made good, and Leo treated him like one.

The two met privately in the Apostolic Library before Leo received Johnson’s 46-person Chicago delegation — Catholic and Protestant clergy, a Methodist pastor, Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann of Mishkan Chicago, and labor, business, and hospitality leaders. They spoke about migrants, the dignity of working people, the U.S.’s history of slavery, Gaza, Cuba, and Haiti.

And then Johnson trolled him.

The mayor arrived bearing a swag bag of Chicago gifts — a key to the city, an invitation to celebrate Mass in Grant Park, and a Chicago Cubs hat. Leo, a lifelong White Sox fan who grew up on the South Side, refused to put it on.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Leo “made it very clear he was already wearing one” — gesturing to the white zucchetto on his head. The Cubs organization, undeterred, sent along a Cubs jersey and two more hats anyway.

It was a warm, funny, fundamentally American moment between two Chicagoans. Johnson left changed. “I witnessed an incredibly humble man,” he wrote afterward, “whose Chicago roots define the magnanimity of his leadership in this moment.”

Donald Trump’s response was to attack the pope again.

On Saturday morning, hours after Johnson left Rome, the president posted on Truth Social: “Someone should explain to the Pope that the Mayor of Chicago is useless, and that Iran cannot have a Nuclear Weapon!”

The Brandon Johnson swipe is the latest entry in seven straight weeks of Trump attacks on the American pope.

Here’s the entire backstory.

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