Saint Joseph Catholic Church

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Vice President JD Vance praised Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical (CWN coverage).

“What I read of it sounds very profound, and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the Church,” he said in an interview with NBC News. “The thing about morality is that the principles never change, but the way you apply those principles does, because the world changes, right?”

“You have to kind of rethink the entire Catholic social teaching in light of the new world that we live in,” the vice president added. “And I think that’s exactly what the Pope is trying to do. So I’m glad that he did it.”

In contrast, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum criticized the encyclical: he said that “I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope.”

Addressing questions from journalists this evening as he left Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo XIV called for aid for the suffering people of Gaza.

Stating that “the people are truly suffering,” Pope Leo urged “all authorities to assist and accompany the people of Gaza, and to help begin reconstruction.”

The Pope also renewed his appeal for a disarmed AI and noted that “war is being waged with AI, without thinking about human lives, which are truly victims of all this.”

The president of the Italian Episcopal Conference hailed Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical (CWN coverage) as “a precious gift, a beacon of light in the darkness of thought and violence that we sometimes feel around us.”

The document “spurs us on to make the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice the principles of reference in an era in which the great challenge is to protect the human,” said Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, as he delivered a lengthy address to his brother bishops at their spring meeting in Rome.

In an unsigned order, the Supreme Court declined to intervene in a class action lawsuit against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over Peter’s Pence.

A Rhode Island resident, David O’Connell, filed a lawsuit against the bishops, alleging that they misrepresented the nature of the annual collection. The case now returns to a lower federal court.

In a prominent front page article in today’s edition, the Vatican newspaper warned that “Ebola now strikes fear.”

“In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, authorities are failing to effectively contain the spread of the epidemic,” L’Osservatore Romano warned. “Interminable lines of people suffering from high fever, hemorrhaging, and spasms form outside hospitals. Inside the wards, doctors and nurses work ceaselessly, hidden behind fogged-up visors and protective suits soaked with sweat.”

Staff journalist Francesco Citterich continued:

The Ebola epidemic, which began almost in total silence, is striking back with a brutal violence that terrifies the world, taking on, hour by hour, the increasingly concrete contours of a new global emergency.

The virus advances relentlessly, spreading at a speed that outpaces the authorities’ ability to contain it: it overwhelms isolated villages, infiltrates refugee camps, and reaches ever-more crowded cities. Health authorities speak openly of a situation spiraling out of control, as fears mount that the contagion is now slipping entirely from their grasp.

Fourteen bishops, most of them from dioceses on the U.S.-Mexico border, expressed “grave concern” about legislation that would provide $72 billion in funding for immigration enforcement.

“As pastors, we remain troubled by how immigrants, the vast majority of whom have committed no crimes and have built equities in the country, have become targets for enforcement, with their God-given human dignity and human rights being violated on a daily basis,” the bishops wrote.

The letter from the 14 bishops followed an earlier letter from the president and migration committee chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“We reiterate that an enforcement-only approach to immigration can never meet the demands of the moral law, nor does such an approach truly support the welfare and prosperity of American communities,” Archbishop Paul Coakley and Bishop Brendan Cahill wrote on May 15.

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