“Peace is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words.” Pope Leo XIV, Address to the diplomatic corp. May 16, 2025
CNS photo/Vatican Media
As the hastily gathered biographies of Pope Leo XIV revealed, Cardinal Robert Prevost was a missionary among the poorest in Peru for many years. In his most recent job, he was the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and part of that job was recommending new bishops for posts all over the world. We have benefited in Rhode Island from his work. First we were gifted with Archbishop Henning, who already has moved on to Boston. Now we are blessed with our new Bishop Bruce Lewandowski from Maryland, who has a reputation for intelligence, orthodoxy, steady thoughtfulness, kindness, and a great love for the poor and those abandoned to the fringes of society. Already many I know who have spent time with him are enthusiastic and impressed with his open kindness and loving pastoral care.
Our new Pope Leo made clear what is most necessary in a shepherd of a diocese. A bishop is not “supposed to be a little prince.” He favors the men “smell like sheep,” as Pope Francis so famously said. He wants only authentically humble men who pastor, who love, who seek out and care for the marginalized, the poor, the lonely, those who have most need of being shown that they are made in the Image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect. We have seen that in the choices here.
For us, Cardinal Prevost’s find with the most personal impact was our much loved former pastor, Father James Ruggieri from St. Patrick Church in Providence, who was appointed as Bishop of Portland for all the churches in Maine, including our former home and where we returned to our faith fifty years ago. While a
pastor for twenty years in an inner city parish, Father James was beloved by many, including us. He had slept on the street with the unhoused. Our Father James founded Saint Patrick Academy, a tuition free high school for city kids with few resources. In all seasons, he drove a lunch van delivering food from the parish kitchen to those on the street all over the city. Not only a fine priest but also one of the finest men I’ve ever met. Genuine humility meeting purpose, perceptive intelligence, deep faith, and bottomless energy. But while recognized as a “priest’s priest” in our little Rhode Island microcosm, he had not served regularly in a diocesan office or been spoken of as someone destined for purple. For those who knew him, there was no surprise, only joy at his being recognized.
We visited Bishop James last fall at his new diocesan office in Portland. I was unsure what to expect, even how to greet him, a concern he put to rest as soon as he saw us with his room lighting smile when he called out our names – warm hugs all around. We caught up for about an hour, and at one point I tried to express something buried deep. Unexpectedly, I choked up, almost coming to tears. I told him that his appointment as a bishop seemingly out of nowhere was for me a sign of great hope for the Church.
“In the designs of Providence, there are no coincidences.” Pope St John Paul II in an address at Fatima
Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected the 267th Pope, the first American in our two thousand year history now presiding over the oldest continuously functioning institution in the world and spiritual leader to 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. After the white smoke went up and it was announced with joy, “Habemus Papam,” the newly elected traditionally retires to the “Stanza della Lacrime” or “Room of Tears” to write out a few words of greeting to the millions waiting to see him, to replace permanently the red vestments of a cardinal with the white vestments he will wear the rest of his life and to contemplate what just happened to him. The room is aptly named. He knows his life has been uprooted profoundly, and his final role must seem overwhelming.
His first major address was to the cardinals who had voted him in and witnessed his installation. He explained the choice for his name as pope, a name that will be his legacy and on his tomb; “Leo” had not been used for a century. “I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
We are at a fork in the road that will redefine how we live with our machines or be subsumed into them; we may already have chosen a path. Not a turning point we can avoid, and the ‘road not taken’ will be of enormous importance. Pope Leo understands what is at stake. Tech elites will forge ahead with astonishing wealth and power at stake. And they will do so with or without direction from the rest of us.
Way beyond a single post or a library of volumes for that matter. Part Two coming up.
“AI development must prioritize principles of human dignity, meaningful work, and community sustainability. Anything less risks building a future in which people are mere cogs in the soulless machine they created rather than wise and faithful stewards of the knowledge and wisdom God has entrusted to us.” Mark Henry, Editorial in Crisis Magazine. “America at a crossroads balancing faith, reason, and artificial intelligence”
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