It is truly true that on many occasions, the trees do not let you see the forest. The last few weeks in the Catholic Church could be described, to a large extent, in this way: the election and the first moments of Leo XIV's pontificate have made the front pages of the main world media.
The universalization of the media, the social networks, the IA..., have joined the attraction that the Catholic Church continues to arouse in a world that observes, astonished, the permanence of an institution that, if it were only human, would have disappeared hundreds of years ago.
In this maelstrom of information and analysis, more human than believers, we Catholics run the risk of forgetting that everything we have lived through is one more link in the History conceived by God and that, above politics, currents of thought, philias and phobias, there is God's plan, the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
A new chapter in the apostolic succession begins, which Leo XIV marked with two words: Love and unity, "the two dimensions of the mission that Jesus entrusted to Peter.".
Leo XIV takes the helm of an internally fractured boat, where pride, envy and misunderstandings have surfaced, as in those fights of the first twelve for "...".who was the most important" (cf. Mk 9:34). As then, Christ asks us the reason for our quarrels in order to remember "that Peter's ministry is marked precisely by this oblative love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity and her true authority is the charity of Christ." (Cf. Leo XIV. Homily at the Mass at the beginning of his Pontificate, 18-5-2025). Leo XIV has once again placed the focus on love, on that caritas of the new commandment given by Christ at the Last Supper and which is the seal of the Church of Christ. A love that will bring about a "first great desire: a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.".
The situation of the Church walking with Leo XIV is not easy. We are in an epochal change similar to the one that marked the beginning of the 20th century and in which the pontificate of Leo XIII developed, from whom Robert Prevost has taken his name and, in a certain way, his spirit. But God is with us, that "beauty so old and so new" whom, like St. Augustine, we love always late and always imperfectly, it is she who guides, together with "the fisherman"This aging and at the same time newborn boat. With love and unity.
