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Dear friends,
Before the last push, I want to stop for a moment late tonight and take a breath with you.
On Tuesday, Americans finish voting in midterm elections that will decide who controls Congress and who sits in 36 governor’s offices, and I want us to walk into these last two days together.
The photo at the top of this letter is the one I posted yesterday for Halloween. I’ll come back to it at the end, because it says something about where we’re going.
What we built together
Over the past two months, you and I have done important work.
Our Catholic voter guides lay out where the candidates stand in 94 Senate, governor, and House races across 28 states, and a national guide grounds them in Faithful Citizenship and the words of Popes Leo and Francis.
By our count, those guides have now made their way to more than 100,000 people across the country.
More than 10,000 of you have signed the Pope Leo Voter pledge, a promise to vote on or before Nov. 3 with a conscience formed by the Catholic faith.
We’ve also tried to tell you the truth about the candidates and the issues on the ballot. Last week I reported that Trump’s Catholic approval has collapsed to 30%, with Hispanic Catholics falling furthest.
In Kansas, Pastor Adam Hamilton, the Methodist preacher JD Vance attacked over his faith, now has a real shot at the Senate. Ohio got its own chapter when Vance defended Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad calling Amy Acton a liar.
James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for Senate against Ken Paxton, cited Pope Leo and two of his predecessors as he pledged to work with Catholics to reduce abortion and expand health care.
Pope Leo, recovering from surgery, used the anniversary of John Paul II’s Assisi summit to declare that “there is no such thing as a holy war.”
And on Friday, Archbishop Edward Weisenburger joined an ICE vigil in Detroit, standing with immigrants days before the vote.
If you want one place to start, read why Pope Leo XIV wants every Catholic to vote.
A pope who votes
Pope Leo has made the Church’s case without any ambiguity. Speaking in St. Peter’s Square on Sept. 2, he told the faithful that “we cannot remain as unengaged spectators.”
He lived it, too.
The Vatican confirmed on Friday that Leo had submitted his mail ballot in Chicago, which made him the first pope in history to vote in an American election.
Democracy has no act more sacred than that one, and the Bishop of Rome performed it himself as Robert Prevost, a registered voter in Will County.
In April, he asked Americans to pick up the phone. Hours after Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” Leo urged citizens to contact their members of Congress about the Iran war and “tell them to work for peace and to reject war.”
Time and again, this pope has pressed Catholics to get involved in political life. Pope Francis put the reason best in Evangelii Gaudium, where he called politics “one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.”
Back to Halloween 2015
The photo at the top of this letter was taken on the South Lawn on Oct. 30, 2015, five weeks after Pope Francis became the first pope to address a joint meeting of Congress.
Donald Trump had launched his campaign that June, and almost nobody in Washington treated it as a real possibility. I think of that fall as the last moment in recent American history before the horrific MAGA encroachment began. A lot of us were hopeful about the future.
The photo reminds me what America can be.
Going back to 2015 isn’t an option, though, and I wouldn’t want it to be; our job is to carry that hope forward into 2027.
The Church always calls us forward. We look to the beautiful moments of our past for inspiration, yet ours has never been a faith that moves backward.
Preaching in the Sistine Chapel the day after his election, Pope Francis told the cardinals that “our life is a journey, and when we stop moving, things go wrong.”
So help us move.
I’m asking for your help
None of this is possible without you.
Letters from Leo runs on its readers, and the guides and late-night stories of these last two months were paid for by people who decided the work mattered.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that stands up to authoritarian tyrants in the United States and around the globe.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing up for the dignity of every human person, I’m humbly asking for your help.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
My prayers for Pope Leo ‘s health and this nation on Tuesday especially.
Love.. Love.. Love the photo of Obama with the child dressed as Pope Leo XIV!!
Those were the days when we had a President who loved children..
not a President who abused them.