Pope Leo's August Prayer: Tear Down Walls and Embrace Diversity

Amid rising tribalism, Pope Leo preaches a gospel of coexistence — and a challenge to the never-ending culture war.

Aug 05, 2025

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Pope Leo’s August prayer intention was rather blunt.

In his July 29 video, he doesn’t ask for vague “peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.”

He instead asks us to pray that societies “avoid internal conflicts due to ethnic, political, religious or ideological reasons”.

That’s diplomatic code for confronting the tribalism tearing nations apart.

Leo is clear that this starts with honesty about our current malaise.

“We live in times of fear and division,” he says, lamenting our habit of building walls that separate us and forgetting that we are brothers and sisters.

He isn’t offering feel‑good platitudes. He wants us to put down our ideological cudgels, see one another as human, and refuse the easy temptation to retreat into echo chambers.

The prayer itself is a game plan forward

It asks us for courage to seek dialogue and to respond to conflict with gestures of fraternity.

It challenges us to be “builders of bridges” and to overcome borders and ideologies, recognizing the inviolable dignity of every person.

That last line is a direct rebuke to nativism and xenophobia, and a reminder that diversity isn’t a threat to be managed but a richness that makes us more human.

Jesuit Fr. Cristóbal Fones of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network explains that this work begins in the heart.

It means ridding ourselves of pride and the “negative words that hurt and kill”.

It also requires setting aside prejudices and actually listening to those who are different.

That’s not sentimentalism; it’s hard labor.

Fones rightly notes that leaders must do their part too: invest in families, safeguard the dignity of the weakest, remedy inequalities and defend truth.

So here’s the challenge. Are we willing to take Leo’s prayer seriously? Politics loves walls — literal and figurative — because fear is cheap currency.

As a professional political operative, I’m as guilty of that as anyone.

But if we’re serious about a common future, we have to build bridges instead. That means listening to people we disagree with, and refusing to let algorithms decide whom we fear.

Diversity isn’t going away; it’s the reality of the twenty-first century.

The question Leo poses is whether we have the courage to let that diversity make us more human, or whether we’ll keep hiding behind walls until they collapse on us.

Thank you for reading!