Why I’m Spending America’s 250th on Lampedusa Island

For the first time, I'm spending the Fourth of July abroad — at Mass on Lampedusa, where Pope Leo XIV stood today and children are buried under crosses cut from shipwrecks.

Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country — a movement for human dignity in the face of authoritarianism. This Fourth of July, I am asking you to join us.

For the first time in my life, I am spending the Fourth of July outside the United States. I am writing from Lampedusa, a speck of rock in the Mediterranean that sits closer to Tunisia than to Rome — the place where Africa reaches toward Europe, and where tens of thousands of people have risked everything, and thousands have drowned, trying to reach a new life.

I am marking it here instead, celebrating holy Mass on this migrant island with the American pope. Leo XIV chose Lampedusa for his visit today. He will walk the pier where migrant boats come ashore and pray at the small cemetery where crosses cut from the wood of shipwrecks mark the graves of children who drowned within sight of Europe.

I did not set out to observe my country’s 250th birthday among the graves of strangers. Now I cannot imagine a more fitting place to stand as an American. Something about celebrating the freest country on earth from the doorstep where the world’s most desperate people come knocking cuts straight to what the day is supposed to mean.

When Pope Francis came to this island in 2013, on the first trip of his papacy, he threw a wreath of flowers into the sea and warned the world about the globalization of indifference — the quiet habit of deciding that other people’s suffering is none of our concern.

Leo has taken up that thread and carried it all the way to Washington’s doorstep, spending his first year insisting that a nation is measured by how it treats the stranger. His decision to come here on our Independence Day, rather than to a gala in Rome or Washington, was no accident.

Here’s what I mean.