Catholic Church

Pope Leo has condemned the huge wages earned by top chief executives, citing Elon Musk’s possible rise to trillionaire status as a concern, in his first interview since being elected in May.

The pontiff also warned that the United Nations was unable to resolve the world’s crises, admitted he was on a steep learning curve as a diplomat and revealed who he would support at the next World Cup.

Since his election the Pope, who was born Robert Prevost in Chicago, has made clear his fears for the plight of the world’s low earners — taking the papal name Leo in honour of Leo XIII, the 19th-century pontiff who campaigned for better wages and union rights for factory workers.

ASSISI, Italy—Every day this summer, thousands of Catholic devotees have streamed into a 12th-century church in this medieval town to pay their respects to a tech-savvy teenager seen by some as the patron saint of the internet.

Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 from leukemia at the age of 15, was officially recognized as a saint by Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, bestowing the Catholic Church’s highest honor on a millennial for the first time.

Sometimes also dubbed “God’s influencer,” St. Carlo’s emerging iconography often depicts him holding a laptop. It is a nod to his hobby—computer programming—a skill he used to spread the Gospel, designing websites for religious institutions and a personal website cataloging miracles.

Young people from nearly 150 countries celebrated Mass on Sunday with Pope Leo XIV at the end of the Catholic Church’s Jubilee of Youth in Italy.

The Vatican said more than a million youth took part in the huge event in a vast open space at Rome’s University of Tor Vergata.

A row has erupted over plans to build the world’s tallest statue of Christ, on the outskirts of Madrid.

A group of Catholics from the town of Boadilla del Monte, a municipality just outside the Spanish capital, have pledged to raise a monumental figure 37m (120ft) high and with a span of 60m (196ft) — taller than Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, which is 30m high. The tallest statue of Christ in the world is at present Christ the King in Swiebodzin, Poland, which is 33m high and has a 2m crown.

It seems so odd in this day and age to see something like this.

He had hardly finished addressing the crowd in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City that Robert Provost, as the newly minted Pope Leo XIV, was transformed into a blank face on which interest groups and lobbies of all kind could draw the image they would like him to become.

Since we are now used to a new kind of journalism, let’s call that the journalism of what might be, as opposed to what has actually happened. In it, projection, not to say fantasy, often replaces the reporting of facts.

Despite warnings to the contrary, ABC News continues to inject American politics into their coverage of the papacy. The most Trump-averse of the legacy networks continues to wishcast their desire that Pope Leo XIV become an anti-Trump Resistance figure.

The May 11th edition of This Week was to be a special edition broadcast from The Vatican, focusing on the historic papacy of the man formerly known as Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, other than a brief aside to cover potential Russia-Ukraine peace talks. And there was broad coverage of the pope’s early life, and a recap of the broader coverage we’ve seen over the course of the past week.