Leo on Liberty — and Francis’s July 4th Message America Still Hasn’t Heard
From Francis’s forgotten speech to Leo’s one-word challenge, the popes have spoken. The question is whether we’re finally ready to listen.
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I was in Rome on May 11, just after Pope Leo’s election, when the new Holy Father delivered a searing indictment of the media’s moral failures and stepped off the stage.
Right next to me, NewsNation’s Robert Sherman shouted, “Holy Father, any message for the United States?”
Leo paused, smiled — and answered in English with a single word: “Many.”
No list. No soundbite. Just many.
That cryptic one-word reply landed because of its brevity. In barely two months as pope, Leo has already given Americans plenty to ponder.
This July Fourth, it’s worth recalling another pontiff’s words to our country a decade ago — a speech whose lessons we have not fully heeded.
Francis opened his historic 2015 address to Congress with the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He reminded lawmakers that on immigration, labor, health care and more, decades of fear-driven policies must give way to empathy and human dignity.
He knew America’s history as a nation of immigrants.
Francis, the son of immigrants, cautioned: “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories.”
It’s worth reading his words in full today:
In recent centuries, millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.
Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. For those peoples and their nations, from the heart of American democracy, I wish to reaffirm my highest esteem and appreciation. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present.
Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our “neighbors” and everything around us.
Building a nation calls us to recognize that we must constantly relate to others, rejecting a mindset of hostility in order to adopt one of reciprocal subsidiarity, in a constant effort to do our best. I am confident that we can do this.
He wasn’t advocating open borders so much as open hearts — a system grounded in law and mercy, not fear.
On capital punishment, Francis was unequivocal. He told Congress: “A just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation.”
He urged America to abolish the death penalty. In a chamber accustomed to compromise, that was one of the most radical — and most ignored — exhortations ever heard there.
Francis described climate change as a moral crisis. Borrowing from Laudato Si’, he insisted the Earth “is not a commodity, it’s a gift,” and that caring for creation shows how we treat the poor and even the unborn.
“We need a conversation which includes everyone,” he declared — demanding not a partisan fix, but a moral awakening.
Above all, Francis reminded Congress that politics can be noble — when it truly serves people and the common good.
Quoting Lincoln, King, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton — not as icons, but as roadmaps — he urged colleagues to choose “hope and healing, of peace and justice” over empty partisanship.
He insisted that politics must serve the human person, not the economy: “Politics is one of the highest forms of love, because it calls to build as one the greatest common good”
Moral courage, he said, must always outweigh party loyalty.
I was at Pope Francis’s speech that day, and I’ll never forget these words that caused everyone from Joseph Biden and John Lewis to John Boehner and Marco Rubio to tear up:
Here too I think of the march which Martin Luther King led from Selma to Montgomery fifty years ago as part of the campaign to fulfill his “dream” of full civil and political rights for African Americans. That dream continues to inspire us all. I am happy that America continues to be, for many, a land of “dreams”. Dreams which lead to action, to participation, to commitment. Dreams which awaken what is deepest and truest in the life of a people.
A decade later, these words resonate louder than ever.
Pope Leo was right: there are “many” messages for America.
Perhaps these five — Golden Rule empathy, welcome to immigrants, end the death penalty, care for creation, and public service over partisanship — are still waiting for us to actually hear.
The real question isn’t what the popes are saying, but whether we, at last, are ready to listen.
Thank you for this article. I remember watching Pope Francis address congress on TV. My favorite pope. Pope Leo is very simular. I hope someday day their words will be heard by many more. They speak of love, fairness, unity for all people.
Thank you Christopher for posting this.
These two people have spoken and are speaking the message and heart of Jesus into a world desperate for his loving touch.
Thomas Merton once said, “The whole problem of our time is not lack of knowledge but lack of love. If we only loved one another we would have no difficulty in trusting one another.”