Six Months of Pope Leo: "This is An Hour For Love"

The moment six months ago, when white smoke billowed over where I stood in St. Peter’s Square and Pope Leo XIV was elected the 267th leader of the Catholic Church, is one I’ll never forget.

Six months ago I never imagined I’d be covering a papacy — let alone that of the first American pope—from the front row.

Earlier in my career, I ran Catholic outreach for President Obama and later led a Catholic progressive advocacy group.

For the past decade, however, I’ve worked squarely in the secular (and often brutally partisan) world of American politics.

So when Newsweek and TIME invited me to report on Pope Francis’s funeral and the conclave to elect his successor, it felt like a surprise detour back into the world of faith and church.

Still, something in my heart told me this was important — too important to miss.

I thought back to the day Pope Francis was elected in 2013. I was a broke 23-year-old staffer in Washington, D.C., watching that announcement on TV with tears of joy. In that instant, I felt a spark of hope and told myself: Someday, I’ll be at his funeral.

The very next day, I opened a “trip savings” account and, little by little, began setting aside whatever I could — no matter how small the contribution—toward a future pilgrimage to Rome.

And indeed, this past April, when the sad news came of Francis’s passing, I emptied that humble savings account and booked a flight to Italy.

At first, my plan was only to attend the funeral as a pilgrim paying respects and head back home.

But as I stood in those prayerful crowds morning after morning, my gut kept nagging: Don’t leave yet. Stay for the conclave. I listened to that intuition.

Thanks to the media credentials arranged by my editors, I found myself still in Rome when the cardinals cast their final ballots — and I’ll never forget the moment I realized I was actually standing on the papal balcony as white smoke rose.

In a blur of ancient ritual and very modern emotions, Pope Leo XIV stepped forward into the global spotlight.

That night on the balcony, as chants of “Viva il Papa!” echoed through the square, I remember feeling an unexpected déjà vu.

It brought to mind October 1978, when the cardinals shocked the world by choosing a Polish pope from behind the Iron Curtain — a man who would go on to help topple one of the most oppressive regimes in history.

Watching Pope Leo XIV emerge, I had the strong sense that history was rhyming. Here was another outsider from an unexpected place (in Leo’s case, Chicago) who might just be called to confront a different kind of tyranny in our time.

I didn’t know exactly how at the time, but I felt deep in my bones that God had given us this American pope for such a time as this.

Six Months of Surprises and Showdowns

Six months later, Pope Leo’s nascent papacy has more than validated that feeling—often in ways that have surprised even seasoned Vatican observers. Frankly, it has surprised me.

I never imagined that in Leo’s first half-year as pope, we would see an ongoing moral showdown between the Vatican and an authoritarian movement in my own country.

Yet here we are: again and again, Pope Leo XIV has shown he’s unafraid to go head-to-head with the forces of division and untruth, including the orbit of President Donald Trump.

After a relatively quiet, cautious start in the early weeks of his pontificate, Leo seemed to find his voice with dramatic clarity around the four-month mark.

In fact, the past 40 days have been the most remarkable of his pontificate so far.

Consider just a few examples: Last month, at a gathering of grassroots social justice groups in Rome, Pope Leo delivered a scathing indictment of the “cruelty” he saw in certain governments’ immigration crackdowns.

“Ever more inhuman measures are being adopted — even celebrated politically — that treat human beings as if they were garbage, not children of God,” he lamented.

No serious observer could mistake his target.

Those words landed squarely amid a new wave of Trump-ordered raids in U.S. cities like Chicago, where immigrant families (many with children, many Catholic) were being dragged from their homes in the dead of night.

Leo followed up that broadside with even more pointed interventions.

Over the span of a week in October, he issued a flurry of public rebukes — at one point his fourth in eight days — directly challenging the harsh anti-migrant fervor coming out of America’s political right.

He praised those migrants “who enrich our communities” and warned that any policy that treats vulnerable people as disposable is “a grave sin and a grave crime” against human dignity. To be clear, this is extraordinarily strong language for a pope to aim at contemporary policies.

In essence, Pope Leo was saying that celebrating cruelty toward immigrants is not just bad politics, but a soul-threatening evil.

And he didn’t stop there. When one of Leo’s top allies, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, released a video condemning the federal raids as an assault on our families, the pope gave his full support.

Leo publicly encouraged Church leaders who “speak with one voice” against such injustices, signaling to the U.S. Catholic hierarchy that defending migrants is a gospel requirement — an essential duty of the faith, not a political talking point.

The message to the faithful and the world could not have been clearer: standing up for the oppressed is at the heart of the Gospel, and the Church must not remain silent in the face of state-sanctioned cruelty.

Perhaps most striking has been Pope Leo’s willingness to implicitly take on Mr. Trump himself.

Historically, popes tread lightly when it comes to directly critiquing world leaders, but Leo has found ways to make his point heard loud and clear.

He has repeatedly denounced the “logic of exclusion” and the “cult of indifference” fueling today’s nationalism — phrases that echo, almost word for word, the ethos of Trump’s political movement.

At times Leo’s confrontation with Trumpism has even played out on social media.

When Leo posted a simple message about God’s love for the poor and the immigrant, some right-wing commentators in the U.S. erupted in fury — one pundit absurdly accused the pope of promoting “open borders Marxism” just for quoting Jesus.

The irony is rich: a pope repeats the most basic truth of Christian teaching, and a faction of Americans loses its mind over it. But Leo’s response has essentially been to smile and keep preaching. He’s not governing by Twitter poll, and he certainly isn’t trimming the Gospel to fit any partisan agenda.

In all these ways, our new pope has shown a boldness that few anticipated. Make no mistake: Pope Leo is mounting a moral confrontation with the empire of lies in our world — the rampant disinformation, scapegoating, and relativism that threaten both the global Church and Western democracy.

And like a wise builder, he seems to be playing the long game.

At just 70, Leo is the youngest pope in 35 years; he may well lead the Church for decades.

He’s using these early months to lay a foundation for what could be a long struggle to reclaim truth and defend human dignity against authoritarian falsehoods.

Watching him these six months, I am more convinced than ever that he intends to win this fight not with worldly weapons, but with the persistent force of truth spoken in love.

“This Is an Hour for Love”

Through it all, Pope Leo has anchored his activism in a deeply Christian vision of hope. His very first words after his election were humble — introducing himself simply as a fellow Christian — and his homily at his inauguration set the tone with a powerful declaration: “This is an hour for love.”

Six months on, Leo’s deeds have given real substance to those words.

If it is truly an hour for love, then our answer to hatred and fear must be to love more fiercely and more concretely.

That’s the example Leo is setting: he confronts injustice not to score political points, but because of love—love for the poor, the migrant, the vulnerable, the truth.

Lord knows I’m far from a perfect Catholic; I’m just a skeptical sinner continually in need of God’s mercy.

Yet in that mercy, I dare to believe that Pope Leo has been given to us for precisely this moment in history. His courage is calling out something better in all of us.

He’s challenging the Church to actually live out what it professes — that every person is sacred — and he’s challenging Americans (religious or not) to remember our nation’s highest ideals.

Whether you’re Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, of another faith or of no formal faith at all, Leo’s mission matters because it speaks to universal human values.

The forces he’s pushing back against — authoritarianism, cruelty, the notion that truth and moral law don’t matter — threaten not only the soul of the Church, but the soul of our democracy and our culture.

Conversely, the virtues he lifts up — compassion, justice, humble service of truth — are the antidote our world so desperately needs right now.

If there’s one thing our turbulent times demand, it’s hope.

Not shallow optimism or “happy talk,” but true hope: the kind that perseveres through dark hours. In fact, hope usually arises through suffering. It often blooms brightest in deprivation and darkness, because it offers a vision beyond what is immediately at hand.

Hope is alive in anyone who has suffered intense loss and kept going; who has stepped forward to love another with no promise of return; who has doubted the existence of God yet prayed anyway; who has endured pain or sacrifice for the sake of someone else and, in doing so, found a strength they didn’t know they had.

That gritty, resilient hope is what Pope Leo is calling us to rediscover. It’s the same hope I sensed on that balcony six months ago — a hope that refuses to yield to cynicism or fear.

As Leo reminds us, this is indeed “an hour for love.” And love, if it’s real, gives birth to hope.

I write Letters from Leo not just to chronicle the pope’s actions, but to rally all of us to recognize what’s happening and to take part in it.

In my own small way, I want to walk with Pope Leo on this journey — to help redeem the highest values of our Church and our nation, to help transform our politics with the light of faith and conscience.

This newsletter is part of what I think of as my “secular priesthood” — my calling to carry the light of Christ’s love into the public square, even in imperfect ways. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the greatest messenger.

I feel uneasy at times writing about matters of faith in the brutal arena of public life. But here I am, doing it anyway, because I believe what Pope Leo is doing has the potential to change our world for the better.

Like Pope John Paul I once said, “I offer you the little that I have and am.”

I offer my back, my mind, my heart, and my love for this Church and this country — both of them blessed, both of them broken.

Thank you, sincerely, for reading and for journeying with me these past six months.

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Most of all, if you’re someone who prays, I humbly ask for your prayers — for me, for this project, and for Pope Leo as he carries a very heavy cross.

Six months is just the beginning. There is a long road ahead, and none of us can walk it alone.

Let us rise, then, fellow travelers, and continue on our way. I’ll see you on the road.