Facelift

Vatican.va has been updated. What was panned for being a "beige" background is actually parchment. I always thought that was clever, to have their webpages be pages of parchment. 

I like the way the information is being organized on the homepage. 

Get with it

A voice of reason at the helm of the JPII Institute:

In an interview with The Pillar during the 2024 consistory, Reina said that the antidote to secularization was “a new evangelization, as John Paul II already called for more than two decades ago now.”

Asked if the Church should adapt its teaching to the times, Reina said “the Church always listens to what man lives today. Yet, the moral teachings have a solid foundation: the teachings of Holy Scripture and what God has always revealed.”

“So, the Church does not need to adapt to the times but must act in such a way that the times adapt to the logic of the Gospel,” he added.

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/paglia-replaced-at-jpii-institute

Crucified

Jesus said to me today, You often call Me your Master. This is pleasing to My Heart; but do not forget, My disciple, that you are a disciple of a crucified Master. Let that one word be enough for you. You know what is contained in the cross (Diary, 1513).

St. Louis the Widower

 “During the month of May, 1888, he went to Alençon, and in his old parish church, which was associated with so many memories for him, he had a particular grace, which he related to his three Carmelites on his return, in a visit to the parlor: ‘Children, I have returned from Alençon, where I received in the Church of Notre Dame such signal graces and such consolations that I made this prayer: “My God, it is too much! I am too happy; it is not possible to go to heaven this way. I wish to suffer something for you, and I offered myself…” The word victim expired on his lips, writes Thérèse, he did not wish to pronounce it before us, but we understood!’” (Céline Martin, The Father of the Little Flower, 71–72).

Into Mystery

Evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery.  - Pope Leo XIV

“The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that, when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.

It is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films. The secular media will always be stronger in this field. And while it is vital that the Church be actively engaged in and with the media, we cannot successfully compete with the secular media.

In his City of God, Augustine teaches that mystery focuses the imagination on the darkness surrounding death—specifically, on the darkness of Christ’s crucifixion, which St. Augustine saw echoed in the deaths of the Christian martyrs. Spectacle, on the other hand—with its companion features: celebrity and heroism—offers people a false comfort by distracting the mind from its instinctive fear of death. Augustine saw this false comfort present in Roman theatre, sports events, secular festivals, and military honors.”

-from his statement to the 2012 Synod of Bishops as Cardinal Prevost

https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2025/05/12/still-in-process/

caveat-- he may not stand by this previous statement from 13 years ago 

Update on St. Rita Day: Kathryn Jean Lopez commented on Relevant Radio, "Pope Leo XIV isn’t here to be a celebrity. He’s here to be a shepherd. And in a time when the world is overloaded with noise and spectacle, his calm, Christ-centered example may be exactly what the Church needs."

Collective sigh of relief

Pope Leo is the moderate choice, able to appeal to both sides, and that alone will bring unity. He will tidy up things, shore up others, and generally conduct himself as a Pope ought to do, as one nuncio put it:

“We can begin to count on a papacy capable of guaranteeing stability and relying on existing structures, without overturning or disrupting them.”

https://www.ncregister.com/news/cardinals-voting-patterns-emerge-as-leo-xiv-is-welcomed-as-a-pope-of-peace

He is only 'American' in the broader, hemispheric sense of the term. He has lived romanitas since he became a seminarian, and he has more pastoral connection to Peru than Chicago. 

That sense as he emerged onto the loggia, radiating warmth and sincerity, and then as he proclaimed peace, confirm what many have observed, that he is a better representative of our nation than our elected leaders:

"They must have seen in Prevost, who is also highly esteemed in Rome, not the leading exponent of the world's leading power, but the best expression of a West that does not bask in the mirror but is capable of launching itself beyond its limits." https://cathcon.blogspot.com/2025/05/ebb-and-flow-of-conclave-italian.html

New Leo, New Rerum

"I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own 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."

Tolle et lege

In the One, we are one

Pope Leo XIV's coat of arms consists of a shield divided into two sectors, each carrying a profound message.

On the left side, against a blue background, there is a stylized white lily, a traditional symbol of purity and innocence.

This flower, often associated with the Virgin Mary, immediately evokes the Marian dimension of the Pope’s spirituality.

This is not a purely devotional call, but a precise indication of the centrality that the Blessed Virgin Mary occupies in the way of the Church: a model of listening, humility, and total surrender to God.

On the right side of the shield, on a white background, is represented the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by an arrow and lying on a closed book.

This image, intense and full of meaning, refers to the mystery of Christ's redeeming sacrifice, a heart bruised by love for humanity, but also to the Word of God, represented by the closed book.

This closed book suggests that divine truth is sometimes veiled and must be received and pursued with the light of faith.

It's an invitation to trust and abandonment, to persevere in the pursuit of the Gospel’s deep meaning, even in moments of darkness.

The motto chosen by Pope Leo XIV, "In Illo uno unum" is taken from a commentary by Saint Augustine on Psalm 127, summarizes the core of his message: “In Him who is One, we are one. ”

These words reflect a Church, united in mind and heart by profession of the same one true Faith, despite the differences and tensions that inevitably permeate it in its human dimension. 

It is an expression of communion founded and encountered in Christ's love, which makes brotherhood and reconciliation possible even in the most complex contexts.

It is not by accident that, in his greeting to the Church and the world, Pope Leo XIV spoke of precisely this: of a Church as a bridge, called to overcome divisions, to make space for meeting, listening and mercy.

Ultimately, through his coat of arms and motto, the new Pontiff proposes a vision of a missionary and Marian Church, deeply rooted in the love of Jesus Christ and faithful to the Gospel. 

Pillar puts it well

"For me, one of the most difficult parts of the Francis pontificate was that I often felt that the pope didn’t know me, didn’t understand people like me, and at bottom didn’t like people like me — or even on occasion, I was given to understand, specifically me.

After St. John Paul II and Benedict, both of whom I felt a deep filial affection for, this was hard.
Pope Leo, however, is already different.

Sure he is an American pope, but that’s not what I mean...

...What many will hope for, though, is that the first canonist pope since St. Paul VI will see the virtue of coherence — legal and doctrinal — in the life of the Church.

Too many of Francis’ intentions and actions became clouded by contradiction and confusion and, whatever anyone might think about his general direction of travel, that incoherence appeared to undermine both the stability and communion of the Church and with it the credibility of her witness.

We’re all waiting to see what kind of pope Leo wants to be."- from Ed Condon's ponderings

Paterfamilias

It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance. A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, “at least equal rights”; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.

...

Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. “The child belongs to the father,” and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that “the child belongs to the father” it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.”[4] The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.

ergo: Public schools are inherently socialist.

St. Rita,

patron of Augustinians, pray for us! 

Pope Leo once taught at St. Rita of Cascia, an all boys prep school just south of Chicago.

St. Leo the Great, pray for us!

Pope Leo XIII inaugurated Catholic Social Doctrine with his encyclical Rerum Novarum.

St. Robert Bellarmine, pray for us!

"Peace and union are the most necessary of all things for men who live in common, and nothing serves so well to establish and maintain these as the forbearing charity whereby we put up with one another's defects."

Our Lady of Pompeii, may our supplication today grant us partial indulgence!

St. Augustine, pray for us!

Habemus Papam!

May the Lord bless and keep Pope Leo XIV and help us be bridges of peace~

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/cardinal-elected-pope-papal-name.html

"God loves us, all of us; evil will not prevail. We are all in the hands of God. Without fear, united, hand in hand with God and among ourselves, we will go forward. We are disciples of Christ, Christ goes before us, and the world needs His light. 

Humanity needs Him like a bridge to reach God and His love. You help us to build bridges with dialogue and encounter so we can all be one people always in peace."

Lord, bless our Pontifex Maximus!

The future of the Church is in Africa

https://thedeaconsbench.com/could-the-next-pope-come-from-africa/

"Let’s start with Nigeria. Getting accurate religious headcounts there is notoriously difficult, given how religious affiliation is heavily politicized in the world’s largest mixed Muslim/Christian nation. Estimates of the Catholic population range from 20 million all the way to 45 million or higher, but for our purposes, let’s use the Vatican number of 32.5 million.

If 94 percent of those folks attend Mass once a week, that translates to 30.5 million Catholics.

By way of contrast, the five largest Catholic countries in western Europe are Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Portugal. Using the percentages in the WVS data, collectively they have about 30.4 million Catholics who show up every Sunday.

In other words, Nigeria alone has roughly the same number of regularly practicing Catholics as all of western Europe.

… Nigeria, Kenya and Congo together would represent a vast pool of 80 million weekly Mass-goers, which would be about one-quarter larger than the total for all of Europe and North America combined.

Here’s another interesting term of comparison.

The two largest Catholic countries in the world are Brazil and Mexico, with Catholic populations of 123 million and 97 million respectively. Yet Mexico has a Mass attendance rate of 47 percent and Brazil just 8, which means that together, they see about 55.4 million Catholics showing up for church every Sunday.

Nigeria and Congo together, meanwhile, generate 68 million weekly Mass-goers. In other words, Africa’s two largest Catholic nations outperform the two biggest in Latin America by about 20 percent."

John Allen noted it two years ago. We shouldn't care what German synodality is doing. We should be praying for an African pope who is fluent in Italian and would deeply value both liturgy and Evangelization...hmm...

I'm not the only one:

https://kevclark.substack.com/p/the-church-and-the-world-needs-an