May 18, 2025 - "Pope Leo XIV"

I was reading his first formal address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, May 10.  I want to quote one paragraph that we would all do well to ponder:

 

It is the Risen Lord, present among us, who protects and guides the church, and continues to fill her with hope through the love “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). It is up to us to be docile listeners to his voice and faithful ministers of his plan of salvation, mindful that God loves to communicate himself, not in the roar of thunder and earthquakes, but in the “whisper of a gentle breeze” (1 Kings 19:12) or, as some translate it, in a “sound of sheer silence. “It is this essential and important encounter to which we must guide and accompany all the holy People of God entrusted to our care.

 

Later in the address the Holy Father explained why he chose to take the name Leo XIV.  The former Cardinal Prevost had been impressed that Pope Leo XIII who reigned as Pope from 1878 to 1903 addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution in the ground-breaking Encyclical Rerum Novarum. Pope Leo XIV told the Cardinals that in our day the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.

 

Pope Leo XIV concluded that meeting with the Cardinals by quoting remarks made by Pope St. Paul VI at the beginning of his Petrine Ministry in 1963, “May it [hope] pass over the whole world like a great flame of faith and love kindled in all men and women of good will. May it shed light on paths of mutual cooperation and bless humanity, now and always, with the very strength of God, without whose help nothing is valid, nothing is holy.”

 

Until next week,

Fr. John