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Pope Leo XIV asked the world on Tuesday to pray “for the proper use of wealth,” and his request arrived a few hours after the first polls opened across the United States.
The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network released his November video on Tuesday afternoon in Rome (around 9 a.m. on the East Coast), and the pope posted a 54-second version on X. “What is wealth to you?” he asks the camera. “Millions in a bank account? A huge house and a shiny new car?”
His own answer comes a beat later. Wealth, he suggests, might be “a place in life where you have enough to share with others,” and he prays that however great anyone’s fortune may be, it becomes an instrument “for doing good, for reconciliation and fraternity.”
The full video opens on Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew, the painting of a tax collector looking up from his coins, before Leo walks into a chapel and, after genuflecting, sits down to pray. The prayer he recites reads like a confession made on behalf of all of us. “Forgive us for storing up instead of sharing,” Leo prays, “for using goods as power rather than as service.”
None of this was purposely aimed at the American elections. The Vatican sets the monthly intentions far in advance and publishes them as a yearly calendar, so nobody in Rome scheduled a prayer about money for an American Election Day. Catholics here can still receive the timing as providence.
It landed in a nation where wealth now sits in fewer hands than at any point the Federal Reserve has measured. The richest 1% of American households held 32.5% of the country’s net worth at the end of June, the highest share since the Fed began tracking it in 1989. The entire bottom half of the country held 2.3%.
Working families feel that gap at the checkout line. Food costs 22% more than it did five years ago, and in NBC News’s exit poll tonight, 88% of voters said they were concerned about the price of groceries. Just under eight in ten said inflation is causing their families hardship.
In California, the question is on the ballot by name. Proposition 40 would levy a one-time 5% tax on the roughly 200 Californians worth more than $1 billion, with most of the money going to health care. Its opponents, led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have outspent supporters on advertising by more than 250 to 1. Leo endorsed no measure and no candidate on Tuesday; his prayer simply asks every voter, rich or poor, what money is for.
A long-running theme
The first American pope has been asking that question since the start of his pontificate, much as Pope Francis did before him. In his first interview as pope, conducted by Crux’s Elise Ann Allen and released in September 2025, Leo noted that CEOs who might have made “four to six times” what their workers earned 60 years ago now make 600 times as much.
Then he turned to a headline. “Yesterday, the news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world,” he said. “What does that mean, and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”
Musk crossed the line this June, when SpaceX’s debut on the Nasdaq pushed his fortune past $1 trillion. As I reported that day, Leo had asked the question hanging over the milestone nine months before it arrived.
His first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, which he signed on the feast of St. Francis in October 2025, completed a draft Francis left behind at his death. It denounces “the dictatorship of an economy that kills” and repeats Francis’s judgment that inequality “is the root of social ills.” In March, Leo carried the message to Monaco, where he told the principality’s billionaires that their prosperity belongs to the poor.
He has also gone to the table himself. On the World Day of the Poor last November, he shared lunch with about 1,300 guests in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall. In July, he sat down with 200 of Rome’s poor in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo and spoke without notes.
“I came without a speech, but I came hungry,” he told them. “Hungry for justice, hungry for authentic charity, hungry for a Church that truly knows how to open its doors.”
Leo took his name from Leo XIII, the pope who answered the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum in 1891 and defended the wages of working men against the barons of his age. Today’s prayer stands squarely in that line. “A heart detached from possessions transforms the world,” Leo prays, and such a heart “opens paths of justice, tears down walls of indifference, and sows hope among the poor.”
For a family choosing between groceries and the electric bill this fall, that sentence describes something concrete, and the same goes for voters in Sacramento and Scranton deciding tonight who will write the country’s tax laws.
Your last chance to vote
For many of you, today is the last opportunity to vote. If you haven’t yet, here is our Catholic voter guide, which lays out where the candidates stand on Pope Leo’s issues in 94 races across 28 states. Leo himself submitted a mail ballot as a registered voter in Will County, Illinois, and he has told Catholics that they cannot remain “unengaged spectators.”
I hope you have the chance to take part in democracy’s most sacred act before the polls close tonight. When you do, I hope you take Pope Leo XIV seriously on the question of wealth. He has asked the whole Church to spend November praying for “the common good and solidarity of those who have less,” and a ballot is one honest way to say amen.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every working family stretching a paycheck across a month that runs longer than the money, along with the countless people of goodwill who believe a nation’s wealth was given to serve all of its people.
On a day when a pope’s prayer and a nation’s vote happened to fall on the same morning, we hold to a faith that sees Christ in the poor and refuses to treat the hoarding of goods as a private matter.
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 a Church that keeps its doors open and its table set, and on Election Day, as the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else reaches a record, that hunger has never felt more urgent.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
