reflections, updates and homilies from Deacon Mike Talbot inspired by the following words from my ordination: Receive the Gospel of Christ whose herald you have become. Believe what you read, teach what you believe and practice what you teach...
Pope: Do not forget those most in need during the summer
In the July/August edition of the Piazza San Pietro magazine, Pope Leo XIV responds to a letter by an Italian man asking how to enrich his faith during the summer season. The Pope highlights the importance of living out the Gospel of peace and mercy and not forgetting those who are suffering.
By Isabella H. de Carvalho
Pope Leo XIV encourages Christians not to forget about the sick, the elderly and those who are suffering during the summer season, in the July/August edition of the Italian magazine, Piazza San Pietro.
The Pope was responding to a letter sent by Maurizio from Rome, who asked how he can live the summer months in a way that deepens and enriches his faith.
How to nurture our spirituality in a frenetic world
In his letter, Maurizio highlights the current turbulent times affected by wars and instability but also by a world that is “faster and more efficient than ever, but often superficial and distracted.”
“I often wonder how it is possible to live and nurture a more conscious and authentic spirituality—one that can translate into concrete acts of love and responsible respect for others,” Maurizio reflects.
He tells the Pope that as the summer holidays approach, he wants to live them not only as a period of rest but also as a moment to “rediscover a deeper dimension” of his inner self, in order also “to rediscover an authentic space for encountering God the Father.”
Maurizio thus concludes the letter by asking the Pope for his thoughts and advice on this.
The Pope’s response: live out the Gospel of peace and mercy
The Pope’s response firstly remembers “those who cannot even enjoy a brief period of rest because they are crushed by burdens of every kind.”
“Let us think of the sick, of those who have lost hope in life, of those overwhelmed by the pain of losing loved ones, of the victims of war, hatred, terrorism, and violence, of those persecuted for their faith and for justice, of prisoners, of those who have lost their jobs or their homes, and of migrants who are not welcomed with humanity,” the Pope emphasizes.
He notes how holidays should be for everyone a time of respite from work and worries in order to experience genuine friendship and company, as a foretaste of the communion of the Kingdom of God.
In order to strengthen one’s faith, he thus calls all Christians to “make use also of the summer to live out the Gospel of peace and mercy.”
“To families, parents and children, the young and the elderly alike—I wish that this summer may be an opportunity for fruitful social and religious experiences, and for deepening their mission in the Church and in society,” he insisted.
He added that he hoped the sick would not lack the closeness of their relatives and volunteers and urged families to not leave their elderly members alone.
The Pope also offered a word of encouragement to volunteers: “Commit yourselves to bringing humanity and hope to those who suffer, and you will see the fruits of grace. You will discover how much love will fill your lives, how much joy, how much happiness.”
He also called Christians to reflect on their privilege and “bear witness to evangelical poverty” when serving the poor, as this is a “service we render to Christ himself.”
“Let us also avoid excess and waste, materialism and consumerism, and let us educate ourselves in simplicity and moderation,” he said, adding that “the accumulation of wealth hinders evangelization.”
Lastly, he expressed his wish that our holidays may “be consistent with a Christian way of life.”
“God's love and grace reach us every day, always,” he concluded. “Let us help one another, in every community, not to squander this precious heritage of humanity and peace, the only hope for giving a future to a world threatened by war.”
Saint Birgitta was the daughter of Uppland’s Lagman, Birger Petersson and his wife, Ingeborg, who was a member of the same clan as the reigning family. Birgitta’s family was pious; her father went to confession every Friday and made long and arduous pilgrimages as far away as the Holy Land.
Birgitta’s mother died, leaving Birgitta, ten years old, Katharine, nine and a newborn baby boy, Israel. The children were sent to their maternal aunt for further education and care. It seems that as a young child, Birgitta had a dream-vision of The Man of Sorrows. This dream was very vivid. Birgitta asked Him who had done that to Him. His answer: ‘All those who despise my love.’ The memory of this dream never left Birgitta and may have even left an indelible mark on her sub-conscious. As was usual during the Middle Ages, Birgitta was married when she was 13 years old to a young man, Ulf Gudmarsson with whom she had eight children, four daughters and four sons, all of them survived infancy, and that was very rare at that time.
When the King of Sweden, Magnus Eriksson married Blanche of Namur, he asked his kinswoman, Birgitta to come and be Lady-in Waiting and to teach the young queen the language and customs of her new country. After her years of service at Court, Birgitta and Ulf made the long pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. On the return journey Ulf became dangerously ill in Arras. Birgitta feared for his death and sat all night by his bed praying, and then a bishop appeared to her, promised that Ulf would recover and ‘God had great things for her to do.’ He told her that he was Denis, Patron of France. Ulf recovered and was able to continue his work as Lagman in the province of Närke until early in the year 1344, when he was very ill so Birgitta took him to the monks at Alvastra where he died and was buried. Birgitta remained in a little house near the abbey, and she spent long hours in prayer by Ulf’s grave. She said that she ‘loved him like my own body.’ She arranged her affairs among her children and various charities and prayed for guidance. She was 41 years old and in the abbey at Alvastra God called her ‘be My Bride and My canal’. He gave her the task of founding new religious order, mainly for women. He said that the other orders had fallen into decay and this new order would be a vineyard whose wine would revivify the Church. He showed her how her abbey church was to be built, gave directions concerning the clothing and prayers of the nuns, 60 in all, who needed priests as chaplains, 13 priests, 4 deacons and 8 lay brothers. These two communities were to be ruled by an abbess, who was to represent the Blessed Virgin Mary together with the Apostles in the Upper Room in Jerusalem.
King Magnus Eriksson donated a little palace and much land to the new monastery, but almost as soon she had begun altering the palace and organizing the work, Christ appeared to her and asked her to go to Rome and wait there until she got the pope to return from France to Rome. She was to be there during the Holy Year 1350. Birgitta left Sweden at the end of 1349 never to return. For the rest of her life, she saw visions concerning the reform of the Church, messages to kings and popes and many other persons in high places, directing them to work for the Church. It may be noted that Birgitta never wrote in the first person. She always said she carried a message from a very High Lord. Although she had longed to become a nun, she never even saw the monastery in Vadstena. In fact, nothing she set out to do was ever realized. She never had the pope return to Rome permanently, she never managed to make peace between France and England, she never saw any nun in the habit that Christ had shown her, and she never returned to Sweden but died, worn out old lady far from home in July 1373. She can be called the Patroness of Failures. In this she was like her Lord. He was also classed as failure as He hung on the Cross. Birgitta was a successful failure as she was canonized in 1391.Birgitta was the only women ever to found a religious Order, Ordo Sanctissimi Salvatoris. It was never a double order but an order primarily for women with permanent chaplains, ruled by an abbess. The brothers had as their head, not a prior but a Confessor General who was responsible for the spiritual business of both convents.
The order spread swiftly throughout Europe with monasteries from Scandinavia right through Europe down to Italy. In modern times is has expanded into five different, juridically independent branches; Spain 1629, Rome 1911, U.S.A. 1970, Mexico at the change of the century. None of these foundations have brothers (except U.S.A. which has one male convent). The last Birgittine father died in Altomünster 1863. She is the patroness of Sweden. Her feast day is July 23.
AI-generated illustration depicting six recent popes above St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
The category of the “just war”—born with Augustine, systematized by Aquinas—was, for centuries, the Christian conscience’s attempt to subject violence to moral criteria.
The magisterium of the recent popes has progressively eroded its ground, down to Leo XIV’s explicit move beyond it.
The turn begins in the atomic era. Pius XII restricted the licit recourse to arms to defense alone. As early as 1944, in his Christmas radio message, in fact, he had declared “now out of date” the theory of war as “an apt and proportionate means of solving international conflicts.” It was “out of date” in Pius XII and “outdated” in Leo XIV: the same word nearly eighty years apart.
John XXIII, in “Pacem in Terris” (1963), declared it alienum a ratione—foreign to reason—to imagine that, in the nuclear age, war could serve as an instrument of justice.
The Council, in “Gaudium et Spes,” called for war to be evaluated “with an entirely new attitude” and condemned total war as a crime against God and against man himself.
John Paul II carried this line down into history: his “never again war” rang out against the Gulf War and, later, against the intervention in Iraq, while “Centesimus Annus” had already called war a “self-destruction of mankind.”
Benedict XVI, more sober in tone, had staked out the position while still a cardinal: asked about the war in Iraq (in an interview with Zenit, on May 2, 2003), he observed that modern weapons strike far beyond combatants, and that therefore “today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.”
With Francis, the doubt becomes a verdict. In “Fratelli Tutti” (No. 258), he writes that it is “very difficult” to invoke rational criteria elaborated in other centuries to speak of a possible “just war,” and he closes with an imperative: “Never again war!”
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From “Pacem in Terris” to “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Church has never ceased to recognize the right to self-defense; it has ceased to lend war the comfort of an adjective.
In a footnote, he adds that Augustine “forged a concept of ‘just war’ that we no longer uphold.”
This is not merely the diagnosis of a “world war fought piecemeal”; it is doctrinal development: at Hiroshima, in 2019, he declared immoral not only the use but the very possession of nuclear weapons.
And to Patriarch Kirill, in March of 2022, with Ukraine under invasion, he said that one can no longer speak, as was once done, of “holy war” or “just war.”
Leo XIV takes a further step. In the encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” he denounces a “paradigm shift”: the rehabilitation of war as an ordinary instrument of international politics, even as the ethical principles that once limited its use erode.
In this context, he writes, “without prejudice to the right to legitimate defense in the strictest sense,” that the theory of the just war, “too often used to justify any kind of war,” is “now outdated.” Humanity has more effective instruments at its disposal: dialogue, diplomacy, forgiveness.
And he extends the argument to the newest frontier—artificial intelligence applied to weapons, which removes the lethal decision from the reach of conscience. His programmatic formula, proclaimed from the loggia on the day of his election, is a peace that is “disarmed and disarming.”
Not a rupture but maturation: Tradition deepening its self-understanding. From “Pacem in Terris” to “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Church has never ceased to recognize the right to self-defense; it has ceased to lend war the comfort of an adjective.
Pope makes surprise excursions to Holy Trinity Shrine and Benedictine monasteries
During a surprise morning excursion on Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV travelled by car from Castel Gandolfo to the Shrine of the Holy Trinity in Vallepietra, before visiting the Monasteries of St Benedict and St Scholastica in Subiaco on the journey back toward his summer residence.
Vatican News
Pope Leo XIV made a surprise visit to the Shrine of the Holy Trinity in Vallepietra on Wednesday morning, 22 July 2026, before continuing to Subiaco, where he visited the Monastery of St Benedict and the Monastery of St Scholastica.
Built into the rock of Mount Autore, the Shrine of the Holy Trinity is located on the border between central Italy's Lazio and Abruzzo regions.
According to a statement released by the Holy See Press Office on Telegram, the Pope spent time in prayer before the revered Holy Trinity fresco inside the shrine and greeted the faithful and the religious community.
Pope Leo, who is taking a summer break at Castel Gandolfo, travelled by car to the shrine, which sits at an elevation of more than 1,800 metres in the Monti Simbruini. It is known as a place of pilgrimage, attracting thousands of faithful who climb the mountain trails on foot bearing banners at Pentecost and for the Feast of St Anne on 26 July.
The inner cave houses ancient frescoes, including a Byzantine image depicting the Holy Trinity as three identical figures of Christ. At the foot of the steps leading out of the shrine is the Chapel of St Anne, carved out of the living rock.
Monastery of St Benedict
Following his visit to Vallepietra, Pope Leo XIV travelled to Subiaco, where he visited the Monastery of St Benedict.
During his visit to the monastic complex, the Pope stopped for silent meditation before the 13th-century fresco of St Francis and, in the Sacred Cave of St Benedict, kissed the knee of the statue of the saint, keeping with tradition. He then recited the Our Father with those present.
Pope Leo XIV in the Sacred Cave of St Benedict in Subiaco (@Vatican Media)
The Monastery and its Shrine of the Sacred Cave have been considered one of the most significant places of Benedictine spirituality for almost a thousand years.
The cave is where the young Saint Benedict of Norcia lived as a hermit in the early 6th century following the example of the Desert Fathers. It was during that period of solitude in this wild place that Saint Benedict was able to bring to maturity the charism and the spirituality which would lead him to found the first monastic communities, sowing the seed of Western monasticism.
The Pope then went to the Monastery of St Scholastica, where he had lunch with the Benedictine community before visiting the cloisters and convent.
The Holy See Press Office said that at the time it issued its statement, the Pope was on his way back to Castel Gandolfo.
The Pope's Wednesday excursions follow his private visit on Monday, 20 July, to the Abbey of Montecassino, where he prayed for global peace.
Patron: of contemplative life, converts, glove makers, hairdressers, penitent sinners, people ridiculed for their piety, perfumeries, pharmacists, sexual temptation, tanners, women
St. Mary Magdalene is one of the greatest saints of the Bible and a legendary example of God's mercy and grace. The precise dates of her birth and death are unknown, but we do know she was present with Christ during his public ministry, death and resurrection. She is mentioned at least a dozen times in the Gospels.
Mary Magdalene has long been regarded as a prostitute or sexually immoral in western Christianity, but this is not supported in the scriptures. It is believed she was a Jewish woman who lived among Gentiles, living as they did.
The Gospels agree that Mary was originally a great sinner. Jesus cast seven demons out of her when he met her. After this, she told several women she associated with and these women also became followers.
There is also debate over if Mary Magdalene is the same unnamed women, a sinner, who weeps and washes Jesus' feet with her hair in the Gospel of John. Scholars are skeptical this is the same person.
Despite the scholarly dispute over her background, what she did in her subsequent life, after meeting Jesus, is much more significant. She was certainly a sinner whom Jesus saved, giving us an example of how no person is beyond the saving grace of God.
During Jesus' ministry, it is believed that Mary Magdalene followed him, part of a semi-permanent entourage who served Jesus and his Disciples.
Mary likely watched the crucifixion from a distance along with the other women who followed Christ during His ministry. Mary was present when Christ rose from the dead, visiting his tomb to anoint his body only to find the stone rolled away and Christ, very much alive, sitting at the place they laid Him. She was the first witness to His resurrection.
After the death of Christ, a legend states that she remained among the early Christians. After fourteen years, she was allegedly put into a boat by Jews, along with several other saints of the early Church, and set adrift without sails or oars. The boat landed in southern France, where she spent the remaining years of her life living in solitude, in a cave.
St. Mary Magdalene's feast day is July 22. She is the patroness of converts, repentant sinners, sexual temptation, pharmacists, tanners and women, and many other places and causes.
How Andy Burnham's religious roots shaped Britain's first Catholic-born prime minister
(RNS) — Back in 2009, Burnham recalled that important influences on him were, in order: the Everton FC soccer team, the Labour Party and the Catholic Church.
Britain's new prime minister, Andy Burnham, and his, wife Marie-France van Heel, wave as they arrive at 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, July 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
(RNS) — When Andy Burnham began his term as the United Kingdom’s 59th prime minister on Monday (July 20), he made history — not only for taking office in an unusual way after the resignation of his unpopular predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, but also for becoming Britain’s first Catholic-born prime minister.
Hundreds of years of restrictions following the English Reformation and institutional bias meant Catholics did not achieve high political offices until relatively recently, and Burnham’s move into the role marks a major shift.
Some may argue former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson beat Burnham to this spot in history. But Blair converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith of his wife and children, after he left office. Many observers speculated that he did not do so earlier because it might have affected delicate negotiations over the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Johnson, baptized a Catholic, had left the church for the Church of England.
Burnham has said on several occasions that his values were shaped by his faith, though in 2015, he said he’s “not particularly religious now.” Back in 2009, he recalled that important influences on him were, in order: the Everton FC soccer team, the Labour Party and the Catholic Church.
Constitutionally, his Catholicism matters, too.
The law still decrees those “who profess the Popish religion” cannot “possess or enjoy the Crown and Government of this Realm,” stemming from England’s split from Rome during the reign of Henry VIII, leading to the creation of the Church of England. After a brief interlude with Catholic Mary I, who appointed a Catholic to the role of chief minister to the crown — as the country’s top job was then called, over 500 years ago — the Church of England became fully rooted in the life of the country as the established church under Elizabeth I.
Today, the monarch still pledges to uphold the Protestant religion at his coronation. And according to a UK Parliament research briefing, if the prime minister is Catholic, some jobs related to Church of England appointments may have to be delegated to another government minister who is part of that church.
Burnham, 56, has said he was shaped by the Catholic Church. Last year, he spoke of its influence during his lecture for the religion-meets-politics think tank, Theos. He told the audience there is a need to move from a crisis of trust to “a culture of encounter,” a phrase he attributed to the late Pope Francis, whom he met at the Vatican two years earlier.
Born in 1970, Burnham grew up with a Catholic mother and attended Catholic school. He grew up between Manchester and Liverpool, where many families stayed loyal to Catholicism despite persecution during the Reformation. Many residents there also descended from Catholic Irish migrants who crossed the Irish Sea looking for work.
He grew up in the years after the Second Vatican Council, when lay Catholics were increasingly encouraged to take roles in church life. His school years also coincided with tough times in the North West, with growing unemployment in traditional industries.
Among the most powerful voices concerned about the impact of government policies of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock. The archbishop often spoke about the Catholic social gospel and how people must stand in solidarity with the poorest in society.
“As an altar boy, he would have heard messages from Derek Worlock criticizing the way central government was failing parts of the North West,” said Francis Davis, a social scientist and visiting fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. “Worlock would deliver his message to his parishes by cassette, and Burnham, the altar boy, would press the button to play the cassette.
Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, arrives at 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, July 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)
During his first campaign to secure the Labour leadership in 2010 — he lost to Ed Miliband — Burnham was interviewed by The Tablet, the Catholic weekly. “My mother was not religious in any showy way,” he told The Tablet. “I am like her in that, to use a Scouse (Liverpudlian) phrase, we don’t lick the altar steps.”
But what has clearly profoundly affected Burnham is the body of theology known as Catholic social teaching. Acknowledging the importance of individual responsibility, Catholic social teaching focuses on the importance of the common good and people working together toward it.
“It is about what we do together to build society,” Davis said.
That influence seemed apparent in a recent Burnham speech, as he talked about “taking power out of the center and putting it in the hands of the people and places who can use it best.”
Burnham, who previously served as a government minister, has spent the past nine years as mayor of Manchester, where he stressed the importance of transferring power to regions and local communities. These efforts led Burnham to work closely with different faith leaders and to travel for a week to Rome in 2023 to meet Pope Francis. He was accompanied by his mother, Eileen, who, he told The Times in an interview published Monday, “will be wearing her rosary beads out” as he enters 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence.
Burnham’s father, Roy, who has dementia and is being cared for in a Catholic care home, according to The Times, is not Catholic himself. But one of his brothers, Nick Burnham, runs Cardinal Newman College in Preston, Lancashire — one of the largest Catholic sixth form colleges in the North West. The prime minister also sent his own children to a Catholic school.
Burnham has also indicated he has difficulties with some aspects of Catholic teaching, particularly personal sexual morality. In 2015, in an interview with Premier Christian News, he said he had issues with its teaching on contraception and homosexuality, describing it as developing “a more judgmental mode” under Pope Benedict XVI. But he went on to say that “Catholic social teaching underpins my politics.”
Catholic leaders will no doubt watch how the new prime minister might deal with contentious issues such as assisted dying, considered anathema to the Catholic Church, or funding for faith schools.
The leading Catholic cleric in England and Wales, the archbishop of Westminster, Richard Moth, told the BBC earlier this month that being a Catholic and Christian as Burnham is, “informs conscience, the way you think about things.”
Under Burnham, he said he hoped “we are going to see that real concern for humanity, not just on the grand scale but for the needs of families and the homeless.” And outside Downing Street on Monday, Burnham said his first task as prime minister is to end “rough sleeping in our country,” referring to unhoused people sleeping on the street.
Moth told the BBC he hoped to have a meeting with Burnham soon.
Burnham will soon meet with international leaders, too. If they include U.S. Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, he will meet a fellow believer who has also acknowledged the importance of Catholic social teaching, but which has led him to different political conclusions. Another contender for a Burnham encounter is the pope. Leo XIV chose his papal name in homage to Leo XIII, the writer of the first Catholic social teaching encyclical, “Rerum Novarum.” Pope Leo XIV added to that body of teaching with his own first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” published in May, on artificial intelligence.
Last week, the papal representative to the UK, Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendia, told a Spanish TV service that a visit from Pope Leo to the UK is “likely, desirable and I would say even unavoidable.” The nuncio was referring to the protocol that means that the UK would invite the pope for a reciprocal visit, after King Charles III visited Pope Leo at the Vatican last year. But given Britain now has its first Catholic chief minister and will mark the bicentennial of Catholic emancipation, which gave Catholics full English citizenship again, in 2029, it could be a particularly timely visit.
Pope Leo XIV: Peace is built through disarmament, not nuclear weapons
The Vatican Publishing House releases a new book by Pope Leo XIV entitled Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. Edited by Alessandro Banfi, the volume brings together Pope Leo's addresses and reflections on peace since his election on 8 May 2025. The collection, which hits the bookshelves in Italian but will soon be available in English, opens with a previously unpublished text by the Pope.
LEO PP. XIV
“Peace be with you” was the Risen Jesus’ first greeting to his apostles (Jn 20:19). This was also the first gift the risen Christ offered to his friends and to the whole world: peace. That gift, however, did not come “cheap”: the glorious body of the Master of Nazareth showed the wounds of the Passion. He experienced hatred, violence, the crucifige of the world. Disarmed and disarming, Jesus Christ endured injustice, and he rose. The Gospel proclamation inserted and inserts itself in history. Today as it did 2,000 years ago.
Peace is the great desire that stirs many hearts, but it is also often threatened, trampled upon and derided. Today, a good 103 States are involved in some way, in a war on Earth.[1] Weapons boom and kill in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Yemen, in Congo and in many other situations. In his time, my beloved predecessor Pope Francis coined the expression, “third world war fought piecemeal”, to describe a situation of widespread conflict, without precedent since the end of the Second World War. Looking through my addresses on this topic, now compiled in this anthology, I would like to underline some aspects that are close to my heart.
Above all, peace is a responsibility. If our first instinct when we encounter a problem, experience tension or are insulted is to judge others, accuse and even condemn them, then, inevitably,first indifference and then hatred will grow around us. There is a way of looking at reality that destroys and does not build. Peace instead, begins with me. It begins with us. Saint Augustine said, “‘The times are troubled, the times are hard, the times are wretched.’ Live good lives, and you will change the times by living good lives; you will change the times, and then you’ll have nothing to grumble about”.[2] We cannot ask the powerful people in the world for peace if we do not begin to live it out ourselves, starting with our daily relationships: in our families, in our homes, in our cities, in the workplace. Peace is built with small daily gestures: the gift of a smile, an injury pardoned, a kind word.
Furthermore, peace is built with truth. Even those who make war claim to act “in the name” of peace. No one has the audacity to declare that they want war for the sake of war: even the powerful of the Earth know that every person aspires to justice and wishes to live in peace. Especially after the terrible consequences of the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the recourse to war is ever more an “adventure with no return”, as Saint John Paul II stressed.[3] I have repeatedmore than once the fervent appeal that Saint Paul VI made to the United Nations Assembly. What unites men, my venerable predecessor noted, is a pact sealed “with an oath that ought to change the future history of the world: never again war, never again war! It is peace, peace, that has to guide the destiny of the nations of all mankind”![4] Above all in the atomic era, the affirmation of the truth must push through: it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament. This truth, which seemed clear in past decades when we witnessed a nuclear de-escalation, has been obscured by a race to armament that today frightens and terrifies. As singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan wrote, figuratively addressing the atomic bomb, in one of his poetic compositions: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled”.[5] Today, the Church humbly brings a question to everyone’s attention: Must the human species continue to inhabit the Earth? The combination of the cyber domain and global rearmament impels one to seriously ask this question.
Peace seeks witnesses. This anthology points this out to us with the strength of many faces. The figures mentioned, among them Blessed Floribert Bwana Chui, and Servants of God Giorgio La Pira and Dorothy Day, are emblematic of many men and women who fostered peace in first person, by overcoming the temptation of corruption, by helping the poor, by supporting diplomacy. Alongside renowned men and women, peace is embodied by “little-known protagonists” who followed their own conscience.
History has already seen us come close to nuclear catastrophe. Records recount that the decision of one-man, Soviet official Stanislav Petrov, contributed to avoiding a possible global atomic war. It was 26 September 1983. The radars of the bunker near Moscow, where Petrov was on duty, signaled the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States toward the Soviet Union. However, it was an error of the Soviet satellite detection system. Petrov disobeyed orders and chose not to signal the presumed attack. It was a decision that was made with the conscience of someone who knew that that simple gesture could have caused millions of deaths. A world in which machines, albeit sophisticated and faster than us, are the ones to decide to bomb defenseless people would be truly frightening. The conscience of a single person can be worth the entire world.
Lastly, peace requires hope. The Church will continue to preach charity towards all men and women. If there is one thing the world is seeking today, I believe it to be a message of peace for the future. Let us look to the future with hope, having found Jesus’ message as the only source. Because this is the essence of Christ’s teaching: charity, love and giving one’s life for others defeat death, isolation, violence: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).
To those who risk falling into the temptation to despair before so many ongoing wars in the world, I direct the invitation that Pope Pius XI extended to the whole Church: “Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre”. May God guide us on paths of non-violence. May believers and people of good will never stop working as builders of peace. May every person make peace his or her life’s cause.
Caesare de Rossi was born at Brandisi, kingdom of Naples, on July 22nd. He was educated by the conventual Franciscans there and by his uncle at St. Mark's in Venice. When sixteen, he joined the Capuchins at Verona, taking the name Lawrence. He pursued his higher studies in theology, philosophy, the bible, Greek, Hebrew, and several other languages at the University of Padua. He was ordained and began to preach with great effect in Northern Italy. He became definitor general of his Order in Rome in 1596, a position he was to hold five times, was assigned to conversion work with Jews, and was sent to Germany, with Blessed Benedict of Urbino, to combat Lutheranism. They founded friaries at Prague, Vienna, and Gorizia, which were to develop into the provinces of Bohemia, Austria, and Styria. At the request of Emperor Rudolf II, Lawrence helped raise an army among the German rulers to fight against the Turks, who were threatening to conquer all of Hungary, became its chaplain, and was among the leaders in the Battle of Szekesfehevar in 1601; many attributed the ensuing victory to him. In 1602, he was elected Vicar General of the Capuchins but refused re-election in 1605. He was sent to Spain by the emperor to persuade Philip III to join the Catholic League, and while there, founded a Capuchin house in Madrid. He was then sent as papal nuncio to the court of Maximillian of Bavaria, served as peacemaker in several royal disputes, and in 1618, retired from worldly affairs to the friary at Caserta. He was recalled at the request of the rulers of Naples to go to Spain to intercede with King Philip for them against the Duke of Osuna, Spanish envoy to naples and convinced the King to recall the Duke to avert an uprising. The trip in the sweltering heat of summer exhausted him, and he died a few days after his meeting with the King at Lisbon on July 22nd. Lawrence wrote a commentary on Genesis and several treatises against Luther, but Lawrence's main writings are in the nine volumes of his sermons. He was canonized in 1881 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope John XXIII in 1959. His feast day is July 21st.
