I Love This Church. I Love This Country. And I Refuse to Give Up on Either.

Sixty-three days before the first nationwide election of Leo’s pontificate, here is what this movement exists to do. I’m asking you to join us for the stretch run.

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass on Lampedusa on July 4, 2026. We were there.

Dear friends,

As summer gives way to September and the final four months of 2026 come into view, I want to speak to you from the heart.

As much as a human being can love an institution, I love the Catholic Church and the United States of America.

I love them the way you love a family: without illusions, fully aware of their failures, stubborn about their promise, and unwilling to abandon them to their worst impulses.

Both are blessed. Both are broken. Both are capable of greatness. And both are worth fighting for.

That is what Letters from Leo exists to do.

This project is an act of service to a Church and a country I believe can be better. It is a refusal to let cynicism, despair, or numbness have the final word.

Our mission is simple and demanding: to make America more just, less cold, and brimming with hope.

That means standing up to the defining threats of our age — creeping authoritarianism and a tech-industrial oligarchy that treats human beings as data points and democracy as a friction problem.

We intend to meet this moment the way serious people always have: by learning from the past, studying what is unfolding now, and using that truth to guide what we build next.

This is not just a newsletter. It is a project born at a McDonald’s off St. Peter’s Square that has become a movement — a growing community of people of all faiths and no faith, drawn together by the witness of Pope Leo XIV and the moral clarity he is bringing into the public square.

The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica rises behind a sign pointing the way — three minutes — to the McDonald’s at Borgo Pio 93, where Letters from Leo was conceived in May 2025.

You have watched that witness all year. On America’s 250th birthday, we were on Lampedusa as Leo stood with the island’s migrants, and in Magnifica Humanitas he gave the Church its charter for defending human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Pope Leo XIV greets congregants before Mass in Lampedusa, Sicily, on July 4, 2026. The author had just wished the first American pope a happy Fourth of July. (Christopher Hale / Letters from Leo)b

Inspired by that witness, we are trying to spark what Leo and Francis have called a “revolution of tenderness” in American politics, culture, and media.

I have a dogmatic belief you and I are living through a providential moment.

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 defeat MAGA authoritarianism — and to call our nation back to a land of dreams and dignity for all who inhabit it.

That providence now asks something of us. On November 3, sixty-three days from now, Americans will vote in the first nationwide election of Leo’s pontificate, and the final four months of 2026 will decide whether the cruelty running our government receives a mandate or a rebuke.

I dedicate my entire heart to ensuring we make America more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.

To paraphrase Peter: I bring neither silver nor gold to this project. I bring the greatest gifts I’ve received — my back, my mind, my heart, and my faith. I offer them in the belief that you and I were made for this moment — to be repairers of the breach.

Letters from Leo is sustained entirely by readers like you. There are no corporate sponsors. No billionaire benefactors. Just ordinary people choosing to invest in something they believe matters.

If you feel the same energy I do, the same urgency I do, the same passion I do, and the same hopefulness I do, I’m asking for your help in three concrete ways:

• 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.

And if you are someone who prays, I humbly ask for your prayers — for me, for this work, and for Pope Leo, who carries a very heavy cross.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing that this country can still be made more just, more humane, and more worthy of our love.

Let us rise, you and I, and make of this blessed but broken nation something more blessed still.

It’s time to get to work. I’ll see you on the road.

PS — If you’d like to make a larger gift through a credit card, check, family foundation, or donor-advised fund, reply to this email or DM us. We’ll gladly help you invest in our mission.