Saint Joseph Catholic Church

At the conclusion of today’s Sunday Angelus address, Pope Leo XIV expressed solidarity with the victims of recent earthquakes in Venezuela.

Love of Christ entails detachment, loss, and hospitality, Pope Leo said today during his midday Angelus address (video).

In summarizing the prelate’s biblical meditation, Vatican News, the news agency of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, reported that Cardinal Ryś said that “the Samaritan’s mercy, closeness and generosity reveal that charity is not the exclusive preserve of Christians but a place where the Church and the world can meet in genuine dialogue.”

Vatican News also reported—inaccurately—that the prelate is the archbishop of Łódź. Pope Leo transferred Cardinal Ryś from Łódź to Kraków last year.

Cardinal Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals, praised Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, as part of the “living tradition of the great documents of the Pontifical Magisterium regarding the Church’s social doctrine, analyzing today’s reality with faith and depth.”

Cardinal Re concluded by thanking the Pope for his “strong words condemning the war, which for everyone is nothing but a loss and a grave, inhumane tragedy.”

An Italian journalist reported today that Cardinal Gerhard Müller “shook up” the extraordinary consistory of the College of Cardinals by calling for a formal response to the Society of Saint Pius X’s latest statements ahead of its scheduled episcopal consecrations.

Vatican News’s summary of the confidential deliberations hinted that some of the cardinals are tiring of synodal meetings: the agency reported that “the cardinals addressed the risk that the complexity of consultation could weigh down the Church at a time when it is called to give its witness.”

“Some of the themes that emerged included deepening the ascetical and historical dimensions of synodality, while offering the faithful an image of the priesthood that is both evangelical and non-clerical,” the summary added.

According to the Vatican News’s summary of the confidential deliberations, “the antidote to individualism and to fractures, many groups agreed, is the Gospel: a Church that offers a sense of belonging, that is able to soothe the wounds of our time, and that is renewed while avoiding forms of integralism and polarization; a Church that makes visible its Samaritan face, with Christians who are not spectators of social ruin, but wise architects who rebuild the city of all.”

According to the summary, the cardinals also discussed the following topics, among others:

• “the deep fractures of our time: among peoples and nations, within societies, and within families themselves; and on how these generate wounds, especially among the poorest, the weakest, young people who lack a sense of newness, and adults lacking the wisdom of years”
• “the danger posed by a lack of meaning, meaningful relationships, and identity, which pushes people toward a tribal attitude”
• “the call to give names to living beings, and not to reduce them to numbers and statistics; to experience and accept the human sense of limits, which AI tends to deny; and to defend the dignity of work”
• the common good, with its “its origin in faith: faith in God and in the transcendent dimension present in every person, which leads human beings to go beyond every frontier, beginning with the one that takes them beyond themselves; to live solidarity with the poor as a response to individualism; to live catholicity fully; to build gratuitous relationships, not institutions, at every level; and to seek a language capable of engaging with settings distant from the Christian faith”

During the Mass, celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals, preached about the Blessed Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross.

Reflecting on Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, Cardinal Brislin said that for believers, contributing to the common good “takes on the form of synodality.”

“Cardinal Brislin described synodality as the concrete trace of the communion from which the Church is born and grows, enabling Christians to enter the building site of history without fear,” Vatican News reported in its summary of the prelate’s remarks.