6+ hour, 38+ min ago   (346+ words) The Gospel this week turns on two words in the middle of a parable, and most of us read straight past them. Jesus says the king was moved with compassion, and the Greek verb underneath that phrase is built from…...

1+ day, 13+ hour ago   (1495+ words) I apologize for adding one more 9/11 story after closing the series last night. Over five days I wrote about the end of my childhood, Welles Crowther, Mayor Mamdani’s invitation to St. Patrick’s, Father Mychal Judge, the memorial Mass that Trump…...

3+ day, 16+ hour ago   (1317+ words) Twenty-five years ago this morning, on September 10, 2001, Father Mychal Judge stood inside the quarters of Engine 73 and Ladder 42 in the Bronx and celebrated Mass for the rededication of the firehouse. In the homily, the FDNY chaplain told the men what…...

4+ day, 14+ hour ago   (1382+ words) On Tuesday, I published an essay arguing that Bishop Robert Barron contradicted Pope Leo XIV on empathy in the service of a MAGA culture war. By Wednesday morning, two clerics I respect had answered me on X, and their answer…...

5+ day, 6+ hour ago   (1082+ words) Donald Trump presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the family of Welles Crowther on Tuesday, standing on the Ellipse beside a 21-foot steel beam pulled from the South Tower, with Welles’s mother, Alison, and his sister Paige accepting on…...

1+ week, 18+ hour ago   (610+ words) The late Mark Shields once said that strong institutions seek converts and weak institutions punish heretics. Put another way, are we spending our time and energy making our communities bigger and more vibrant or smaller and more rigid? Pope Francis…...

2+ week, 9+ hour ago   (561+ words) Letters from Leo is not a politics-first newsletter. We ground everything we do here in the faith of the apostles and in the source and summit of that faith, the Sunday Eucharist and its Liturgy of the Word. In today’s…...

3+ week, 9+ hour ago   (621+ words) From the outset of this project, I have said consistently that Letters from Leo is not a political-first movement. We are formed in the faith of the apostles, and the Sunday Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian…...

3+ week, 3+ day ago   (983+ words) Soon after the Napa Institute’s summer conference in late July (the annual gathering of wealthy conservative Catholic donors in Napa Valley, attended this year by Brian Burch, the founder of CatholicVote and the United States ambassador to the Holy See),…...