By JP Misheff, May 13, 2026
On May 8th, as the world commemorated the year anniversary of the first U.S. pope of the Catholic Church, Leo was in Pompeii. As we’ve seen with this pontiff, his activities have for the most part been carefully, prayerfully considered. It turns out that May 8th is a traditional a day of prayer to Our Lady of Pompeii, a devotion begun in the 19th century by St Bartolo Longo, whom St John Paul II called an “apostle of the rosary” at his beatification in 1980, and whom Leo canonized last October.
In his homily, Leo again placed his papacy under Mary’s protection and expressed his sense that his office has a certain Marian “mark” as a result of his election happening on a day dedicated to the rosary. It was therefore an opportunity for him to reflect on the importance of praying the rosary, which he referred to as an “act of love.”
Leo: “Is it not characteristic of love to repeat, without tiring: ‘I love you’? An act of love which, through the beads of the rosary, leads us back to Jesus and brings us to the Eucharist, ‘the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.’”
His homily ended with a passionate plea for clarity on the real source of our salvation: “Brothers and sisters, no earthly power will save the world, but only the divine power of love, this divine power of love that Jesus, the Lord, has revealed to us and given us. Let us believe in Him, let us hope in Him, let us follow Him!”
This is a message Mary knows all too well. She was always meant to be a clear yet hidden channel for His goodness to be born and shine through. As St Louis de Montfort says in his “True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary,” “So great was her humility that she desired nothing more upon earth than to remain unknown to herself and to others, and to be known only to God.”
After all the hullabaloo that the media has stirred up pitting him against President Trump, Leo offers a humbling, sober message for all world leaders, for all of us — not to get it twisted: we cannot do this on our own! We are nothing without Him!
Just today in his general audience, on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, Leo took the opportunity to praise Mary’s faithfulness again as expressed in the final section of Lumen Gentium: “[Mary] is the believer par excellence, in whom we are offered the perfect form of unconditional openness to the divine mystery within the communion of God’s holy people.”
Let us pray to attain even an ounce of her calm openness to the Spirit’s stirrings.
JP Misheff is a first year MDiv candidate at Saint John’s University School of Theology.
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