“Out of Many, One” — On the Eve of America’s 250th, Pope Leo XIV Defends the Diversity of a Nation of Immigrants

Accepting the Liberty Medal from the Vatican, the first American pope said immigrants made his country “a byword for freedom” — the Bernardin ethic, womb to tomb, aimed at Trump’s Washington. Tomorrow he lands among the migrants of Lampedusa.

Pope Leo XIV accepted the 38th Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center on Friday morning, speaking live from the Vatican to the crowd gathered on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall against the backdrop of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted 250 years ago this weekend.

The Center honored the first American pope for his lifelong work “promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression around the world.” A delegation had traveled to Rome in April to place the 2026 medal in his hands during a private audience; Friday brought the formal acceptance, timed to the eve of the nation’s semiquincentennial and staged with the City of Philadelphia as part of its Independence Week celebrations.

He joins a roll of laureates that includes Volodymyr Zelensky, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John McCain, John Lewis, the Dalai Lama, Malala Yousafzai, Hillary Clinton, and George W. and Laura Bush. Last October the medal went to the Broadway musical Hamilton and Ron Chernow, the historian whose biography inspired it.

Villanova University, where a young Robert Prevost took his mathematics degree in 1977, helped shape this year’s program.

And the pope opened his remarks with a sentence no previous pope could have spoken: “As a son of this great country, founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God’s blessings upon America’s future.”

Donald Trump’s name appears nowhere in the address. Read against the record of the administration now governing the pope’s homeland, many lines land as a challenge. Here’s a rundown.