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First, the news from Rome about Pope Leo XIV’s health.
Pope Leo XIV had a good second night at Gemelli Hospital and got up for breakfast, the Holy See Press Office said Thursday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, he concelebrated Mass in a room prepared for him on the hospital’s 10th floor.
His doctors, Luigi Carbone and the thoracic surgeon Stefano Margaritora, said his blood tests and chest X-ray came back within the expected range, and he has started walking around his room. The Vatican still expects a stay of about a week.
In a second bulletin Thursday afternoon, the doctors said his postoperative recovery is “progressing normally,” with “good recovery of the lung that underwent surgery.” He went about his daily activities on his own and completed a full physiotherapy session.
As I reported last night, the pope still intends to fly to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru on Nov. 6.
Please keep praying for him. Now to Texas.
James Talarico invoked three popes by name on Wednesday night in Fort Worth, where CNN and Jubilee put the Democratic Senate nominee in front of Texas voters for 90 minutes. Ken Paxton, his Republican opponent, was invited and stayed home.
What filled the empty chair was a conversation about faith that Democrats rarely attempt on national television. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and four-term state representative, quoted Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV to a pro-life Catholic professor, then cited Pope Benedict XVI while answering a Republican who doubted his Christianity. By the end of the night, CNN counted references to the last three popes.
The stakes are real. A Marist poll released Wednesday had Talarico ahead of Paxton 47 percent to 45 percent among likely voters, and early voting in Texas starts Monday.
The first voter to join him on stage was Jodi Hunt, a farmer, theologian and university professor from Burleson who called herself an orthodox Catholic and, like many Catholics, a one-issue voter.
If Democrats won’t protect “the most innocent among us, who is the unborn child,” she asked him, how could she trust them to protect the rest of Texans?
Talarico answered by naming his heroes.
“You know, some of my spiritual heroes, like Pope Francis and Pope Leo, are pro-life, and they are consistently pro-life,” he told her. “They’re not just against abortion, but they are against poverty, against climate change, against war. And so I can respect anyone like you who is consistently pro-life.”
He never pretended the two of them agreed on the law. “We may come to different moral and ethical conclusions when it comes to the question of should abortion be legal or not,” he said. Then he offered her a project they could share, which was driving down the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions in Texas.
“If we treat this issue as a public health problem and not a culture war problem, then we can actually make progress together,” Talarico said. He also asked her to look hard at what the state’s ban has done to women facing medical emergencies: “If we are authentically pro-life, I think we should be disturbed by the outcomes of this extreme abortion ban.”
Hunt held her ground. When Talarico said the Bible is silent on abortion, she answered with the commandment against killing, and on that point the Church stands squarely with her; Christians have condemned abortion since the Didache, a catechism from the first century. She also pushed back on sex education, since Catholics hold that parents are the first educators of their children. Still, she thanked him for “tending to the life from the womb to the tomb.”
After the broadcast, Hunt told CNN she had been “really impressed with him this evening” and surprised by “how centrist he was on many of the issues.”
She said his willingness to sit down with her made her reconsider her vote, “Well, let me rethink that.”
That is what persuasion looks like.
The same instinct ran through his case on health care. Talarico, who has type 1 diabetes, choked up as he described buying insulin for the first time. He promised to roll back the cuts to the Affordable Care Act and called for “a robust public option that can compete with the for-profit health insurance companies in this country.”
“I believe that health care is a human right,” he said.
The Church said the same thing more than sixty years ago. In Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII listed medical care among the things every person has a right to, alongside food, clothing, and shelter.
The exchange that might go the furthest from the right was about Talarico’s faith itself.
A Republican voter asked Talarico whether the Bible is “the absolute source of truth and God’s final authoritative word.” He answered with one word: “Yes.” Then she pressed him on his 2021 remark on the Texas House floor that “God is nonbinary.”
Talarico owned it. “When I said that, I was being provocative, and I want to admit that and come clean about that,” he said. The point underneath the provocation, he explained, is ordinary Christian theology: “the idea that we can’t define God using human categories. Not only did I say that, but the late Charlie Kirk said that, the late Pope Benedict said that.”
On the theology, he is right. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes; in its words, God “is neither man nor woman: he is God.” St. Paul made a kindred point to the Galatians, writing that in Christ “there is neither male nor female.” Christians call God Father, and the Church keeps that language, yet it has never taught that God has a body or a sex.
Naming Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder who was assassinated last year, let Talarico meet his questioner on her own ground. He closed the exchange the way a pastor might.
“You are my sister in Christ,” he told her. “It’s OK if you and I have disagreements. That should be encouraged, not discouraged.”
Talarico’s phrase “consistently pro-life” comes straight from the Church.
Remember Pope Leo XIV’s words about this topic in September 2025: “Someone who says I’m against abortion but says I’m in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life.” The pope applied the same test to the inhuman treatment of immigrants, a standard that leaves both parties short.
I am a Democrat, and this is the conversation I want my party to have with people of goodwill across the aisle, above all with people of faith like Jodi Hunt and like me. Catholics who vote on abortion are neighbors to be persuaded. Many of them also care about what insulin costs and what is happening to immigrant families in Texas, and they will listen to a candidate who takes their conscience seriously.
Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., understood this. Last week I wrote about the former Notre Dame president after Commonweal gave him its Centennial Award. In 2009, over the objections of dozens of bishops, he invited a newly inaugurated Barack Obama to deliver Notre Dame’s commencement address. Before Obama reached the lectern, Jenkins told the crowd that the university opposed the president’s policies on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. He praised him anyway. “President Obama is not someone who stops talking to those who differ with him,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins staked his career on the art of persuasion and dialogue. “If we earnestly try to persuade, civility takes care of itself,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2013. Talarico seemed to grasp the same truth in Fort Worth.
On the night of his election, Pope Leo XIV asked the world to help him build bridges “through dialogue, through encounter.”
On Wednesday, a Texas Presbyterian did a version of that on a cable news stage, with a Catholic professor who disagreed with him on the question she cares about most. My party should study the tape.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with every Catholic and every person of goodwill who believes politics can still be a place of encounter, where a pro-life professor and a pro-choice seminarian can disagree about the law and still work together to protect mothers and children.
Talarico called our moment the “rage economy” on Wednesday night, and he is right that someone profits from it. Our community exists to build the opposite: a place where faith shapes how we argue, and where the dignity of the person across the stage is never up for debate.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because readers are hungry for conversation that is honest about disagreement and generous toward the people on the other side of it.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill seeking common ground for the sake of the unborn and the sick — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
One observation:
Mario Cuomo squared off against Henry Hyde over the issue of abortion in 1984.
Cuomo’s speech was a masterpiece.
His basic position was that a pro-choice stance was NOT a pro-abortion stance.
It is simply a recognition that with respect to pregnancy termination, using legislative means to attain a moral goal is counterproductive.
Time has proven him correct.
The decision belongs with the family, the physician, and the spiritual counselor - not with legislators and judges.
I know it must take a lot of restraint when one-issue abortion voters people talk about "protecting life", yet who consistently continue to vote for the party of the man who called himself "the father of IVF", and whose cuts to USAID have already killed thousands of children, just for starters . . .