The French National Assembly has dropped the most controversial part of a child protection bill that would have lifted the seal of confession in cases of violence against minors.
The provision, which sought to challenge sacramental secrecy, was the focal point of heated debates over the past few days in the Assembly during examination of the legislation aimed at protecting children and combating violence in schools. The bill was finally adopted on June 1 without this measure.
On May 25, Pope Leo XIV addressed members of the European Parliament’s Intergroup on Demography at the Vatican with a warning that they risk becoming “the old continent”—not because of its ancient history, but because of its advancing age. Declining birthrates and population aging, according to the Holy Father, are “an urgent challenge with practical implications for millions of people and their families.”
Well, isn’t this interesting?
Over there at Mediaite is this headline: “Pope Leo Makes Historic Public Apology for Vatican’s Complicity in Slavery,” but silence on reparations.
VATICAN CITY — In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV put forth an ode to human dignity in the era of AI on Monday, delivering a far-ranging treatise on the morality of technology that included a dramatic plea for guardrails to ensure that artificial intelligence eases — rather than exacerbates — inequality and poverty, helping to improve conditions for workers and limiting the power of technology companies over the vast computing resources that could reshape how human beings live.
An encyclical is among the highest forms of papal documents, and Leo’s first — his most important writing to date — positions AI as the catalyst of a new kind of industrial revolution, a cognitive one that has already begun to redefine how the world works, lives, plays, loves and wages war. The document sets a clear tone for Leo’s early papacy, elevating the ethics of AI to a religious imperative in the same way Pope Francis did with the fight against climate change a decade ago.
In a Vatican ceremony this week 13 ambassadors to the Holy See received a prestigious honorific distinction. News that the recipients included Iran’s Mohammad Hossein Mokhtari caused eyebrows to be raised.
After the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) brutally clamped down on protests this year, killing 30,0000 people according to some estimates, an Iranian official might seem like an unlikely recipient of the Grand Cross of the Pontifical Order of Pius IX, which Iranian media claimed was awarded for efforts to “promote peace”.
After more than a decade of chaos, confusion, and pseudo-progressive politics under the pontificate of the late Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV is restoring some sense of stability to the Vatican. The clarity of the pontiff’s words, however, would be greatly aided by a corresponding clarity in his actions. As our own Paul Kengor pointed out recently, Pope Leo has rejected the progressive, globalist call for open borders, instead reaffirming the Catholic Church’s longstanding support for national sovereignty and the authority — indeed, the obligation — for rulers and lawmakers to protect their people.
The Vatican has said it raised the “need to work tirelessly in favour of peace” in talks with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is in Rome on a trip widely regarded as an effort to ease tensions after Donald Trump’s repeated criticisms of Pope Leo.
Amid unprecedented strain on relations between the Holy See and Washington, Rubio was received by the pope on Thursday at the Apostolic Palace, before holding a series of meetings with Vatican officials
Vatican video showed the first north American pope shaking hands with his guest and addressing him formally as “Mr Secretary”, to which Rubio, a Catholic, responded: “Great to see you.”
For a long time, progressive Christians have tended to equate the faith with humanitarian illusions—with utopian sentimentality rather than a morally demanding politics of prudence rooted in right reason and natural law. Divine caritas has been displaced by a selective, highly politicized compassion, and the Christian affirmation of moral equality has transformed into a doctrinaire egalitarianism, at once naive and aggressive. Inequality per se is now treated as a grave moral fault, as if the comprehensive leveling of the social order were either possible or desirable.
Pope Leo says he was not seeking to debate Donald Trump when he criticised “tyrants” for spending billions on wars in a speech earlier this week.
The pontiff said the remarks, delivered days after a high-profile spat with the US president, had been written a fortnight earlier – “well before the president ever commented on myself”.
“And yet as it happens, it was looked at as if I was trying to debate, again, the president, which is not in my interest at all,” he told reporters aboard a flight to Angola on Saturday.
Pope Leo said the world is being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” in his latest anti-war remarks.
Speaking in Bamenda, northwest Cameroon, on the latest leg of an 11-day African tour, the American pontiff criticised leaders who spend “billions on war” and called for a “decisive change of course”.
There is an old adage that goes like this: “If someone says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
While the Roman Catholic Church has largely been quiet on geopolitical matters over the past few decades, it’s only been since President Donald Trump started to more aggressively enforce America’s standing border protection policies and immigration laws that the Vatican has clearly gotten political.
Pope Leo XIV recently spoke during his visit to Algeria and called for Catholics to be a little less fearful of Islam, urging dialogue and respect instead of concern about mass immigration from Muslim countries. He pointed to Lebanon as a place where Christians and Muslims live as friends.
If the purpose of trolling — the posting of offensive or inflammatory messages about an individual on social media — is to produce an overreaction, Donald Trump is a grandmaster of the genre.
He lashed out at Pope Leo XIV for opposing the Iran war. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
President Trump has posted an AI-generated image seemingly depicting himself as Jesus Christ as he attacked the Pope for not supporting his war in Iran.
In the image, posted at the same time as the US president criticised the Pope for being “weak” on crime and “terrible” for foreign policy, Trump appears dressed in red and white robes as he cures a man with his healing hand. The American flag is shown over his shoulder. The image was shared on the president’s Truth Social site.
Update: Trump posts, then deletes AI image of himself as Christ-like figure, sparking blasphemy accusations
Trump is drawing heat even on Truth Social for this post but some added context was supplied about the origin of the picture in his defense, regardless many are not buying in.
PS. Let me know if you can access the Truth Social links above, I will add the origin/defense pic in the comments.
The Vatican has announced that as part of his upcoming African tour, Pope Leo XIV will visit Algeria 13–15 April.
Pope Leo XIV’s upcoming trip is a historic event. No acting pontiff has ever visited Algeria, a former stronghold of ancient Christianity whose current population of 48 million is about 99% Muslim.
2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the 1996 attack on an Algerian monastery in which seven monks were kidnapped and beheaded by an Islamic group. Today, religious freedom has significantly deteriorated in the country, particularly impacting Algeria’s roughly 156,000 Christians. Algeria is currently ranked as the 20th most oppressive nation for Christians by the human rights organization Open Doors.
