‘Enough With the Bullying’ — Pope Leo XIV Sets the Stage for His July 4 Trip to Lampedusa
On Saturday the pope venerated St. Augustine’s relics in Pavia and knelt before the heart of Mother Cabrini, patron of migrants. Every step pointed toward the Isle of Tears — and toward America.
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“Enough with insults, enough with bullying, enough with all those things that wage war between people, between communities, between countries!”
Pope Leo XIV said that on Saturday evening in Pavia’s Piazza Vittoria, to a crowd that had waited hours in the northern Italian heat to see him.
He had come north for two relics, the bones of one saint and the heart of another. Both pointed the same way, a rehearsal for where he goes next.
Saturday was a six-hour pilgrimage folded into a single afternoon. Leo flew to Pavia to pray before the remains of St. Augustine, the fourth-century bishop whose Confessions shaped the Augustinian order he entered as a young man.
Then he traveled a few kilometers east to Sant’Angelo Lodigiano to kneel before the literal heart of Frances Xavier Cabrini, the patron saint of migrants.
In Pavia, Leo prayed before a gold-rimmed glass case holding Augustine’s relics at the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. He told the priests and religious of the diocese that they must learn to be Christian communities centered on the essential, “even if this entails renouncing some structures and some securities of the past.” The essential, he said, “is to live with Christ.”
He framed the saint as a gift the whole Church still needs. “Saint Augustine does not belong to us; he belongs to the Church,” Leo said of the order he once led, and our task is to make him known, because “he has so much to offer in this time.”
Outside the cathedral, he quoted Augustine to the crowd — “If we want to change the times, if we want the world to live in peace, we must begin with ourselves” — and steered the thought toward peacemaking before the rebuke against hate and bullying.
He pressed the young people hardest, urging them to build “authentic friendships, not just friendships made on screens or cell phones,” and to be present to one another in the flesh.
The second stop to the relics of the first U.S. citizen ever canonized and the patron saint of migrant carried the real weight of the day. Let me explain why.
