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Hey everybody,
Before his inaugural Mass on Sunday, Pope Leo XIV took his first ride through St. Peter’s Square in a modified pearl white electric Mercedes G580, with an open back and a single swivelling chair designed especially for Pope Francis but not used by Leo, who stood Sunday in the bed of the vehicle gripping a specially mounted handle above the cab.
It’s a relatively new car, presented to Pope Francis in late 2024 by Mercedes, which has made cars for popes since 1930 — though not exclusively.
The first custom papal jobs were modified limousines with high-end upholstery and seats arranged so that, even in the back of a car, the pontiff had a singular place of honor.
By the time of Pope St. John XXIII, Mercedes was making open papal cars, which were used by Pope St. Paul VI, as well.
But the modern open-backed papal vehicle reached its high point in the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II, who used a completely open car until the 1981 attempt on his life, when he began using a variety of cars that left him surrounded by a bubble of bulletproof glass, leading to “pope-in-a-box” proto-memes. Benedict used those too, sometimes, and sometimes Francis:
The open car used by Leo is a step up from that one.
If you ask me, Leo is the pope with enough social credibility to bring back the papal carriage, if he really wanted to.
Or the custom of popes riding horseback, with awesome tricorn hats.
But he probably won’t. He’ll probably keep it classy with this Mercedes, which has been specially adapted to drive at the slow speeds necessary for papal processions.
I’m told that inside the Vatican City State, the pope is happy to be driven in whatever vehicle is available, and happy to sit shotgun when he needs to.
Papal cars are cool, including the one Leo rode this weekend.
But it’s time for real talk, friends. We need to stop saying “popemobile.” It’s gauche. It’s cringy. It’s not especially clever, and it makes the pontiff sound like a second-rate Batman.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so — In 2002, JPII said the term “popemobile” was "undignified," and asked Catholics to stop using it.
We didn’t listen.
Actually, we don’t need to call the pope’s car anything in particular. “Papal vehicle” will do, or even vehiculum pontificium.
We should definitely avoid monikers like “Vatican 1,” given the confusion they’ll cause.
But whatever the case, it’s time for “popemobile” to die. All of us — each and every one of us — can do better than that.
The news
“The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely” by “self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity and its true authority is the charity of Christ,” Leo preached.
Then he made this interesting point:
“St. Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation of being an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him,” the pope said. “On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, and to walk alongside them.”
The pontiff’s predecessor was often accused of an autocratic style, despite his commitment-in-principle to the notion of synodality, and a consultative approach to leadership. Was Leo’s remark meant to acknowledge that — to suggest a new day in the Apostolic Palace?
I don’t know.
In fact, Leo made it a point to praise Francis during his inauguration, even telling Catholics that he “strongly felt the spiritual presence of Pope Francis accompanying us from heaven.”
Still, the pontiff strikes me as a man who measures most words before he uses them. And that remark about rejecting the temptation to autocracy must have come from somewhere.
Of course, in a beautiful liturgy, rich with the symbols of the faith and of the papacy, that’s not the only moment worth pondering.
Read the whole thing, right here.
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Ahead of the papal inauguration Mass, The Pillar reported that U.S. Vice President JD Vance had requested a sit-down meeting with Pope Leo, which would make him the last civic official to have a meeting with Pope Francis, and one of the first to meet with the new pope.
The meeting, it turns out, did happen, with both Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio meeting with the pontiff at the apostolic palace on Monday.
Given the tension surrounding Vance’s relationship with the U.S. bishops — and the pope’s tweet about Vance ahead of his papal election — the meeting was likely an interesting conversation, and a “frank exchange of views.”
But for my money, Rubio’s engagement with Pope Leo might have been the most interesting part of the gathering.
Why? Well, you have to wait for Michelle La Rosa to tell you, in an analysis on Rubio and the pope, coming later this week.
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Sunday’s inauguration Mass was packed with tens of thousands of Catholics from all around the world, who had come to pray with the pope.
Why? What made them come? What did they hope to experience?
Before and after the Mass, The Pillar’s own Edgar Beltran was down in St. Peter’s Square, talking with pilgrims, including this guy.
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Meanwhile, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone talked with The Pillar Friday about his belief that Pope Leo XIV could bring “end the liturgy wars” which have roiled the Latin Catholic Church for decades.
Why? Well, “I think he will lead by example especially. He wants to be a bridge builder - that was very clear from when he first stepped out on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica,” Cordileone said.
What does that mean to Cordileone?
“The vision has to be set whereby the traditional Mass is easily available for those who want it. I would hope that we can come to the time when both forms of the Mass are the ordinary experience of everyday Catholics, and they're just as comfortable in either form of the Mass,” he said.
How can it happen?
“When people who love the traditional Mass ask me what they can do to promote this, I say, open up a diner for people on the street, work at a homeless shelter, support a crisis pregnancy clinic. Put your faith into action to show that you're an integrated Catholic.”
It’s a fascinating interview. Read the whole thing.
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Just fresh off his inauguration, and still less than 10 days since his election, Pope Leo XIV has got a lot of work to do — and he seems willing to get down to the business of doing it.
Among the things waiting on his desk is how to deal with China — a topic Ed. Condon took up recently, in the most recent installment of “On Leo’s Desk” — our series on the topics awaiting the pontiff.
As Ed looked at that, Edgar Beltrán wrote about the Lima litmus test for Peruvian Pope Leo — the Archbishop of Lima, Peru, is 75 years old, and owing to Leo’s familiarity with the country, and the complexity of affairs in the Lima archdiocese, his eventual appointment could say a lot about the kind of shepherds Pope Leo is looking for.
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Next, read an interview with Leah Libresco Sargeant about PRAMS, the federal teams coordinating data collection on pregnancy, aimed at helping create better policy to assist women in high-risk pregnancies.
Since April, PRAMS has been on hiatus, as the federal Department of Health and Human Services gets restructured — and it might not be back at all.
Dr. Isaac Michael explained to The Pillar why that matters.
Hacked
Pope Leo XIV has told the Church — several times now — that he wants to focus his teaching ministry on a cogent and Catholic response to the threat posed to the world by AI.
He’s right to raise this.
AI has the potential to disrupt nearly every sector of the modern labor market, and in ways that could be catastrophic for wage earners — making the rich richer and the poor much poorer, and leaving an ever-smaller middle class between them.
Sure, various kinds of AI can be potentially harnessed for our common human flourishing, and maybe it will be. But major technological changes are a double-edged sword, and there’s no guarantee that the virtuous use of this one will carry the day.
And it’s not just economics. AI will disrupt politics, communications, and culture too. It will demand a cogent response to the philosophy of technocratic efficiency-driven utilitarianism. And it will make a truth a precious and hard to attain commodity — “blessed assurance” that we can ever know what’s real will be hard to come by.
Consider the millions of people who have already watched really weird Leo XIV deepfakes on YouTube. Now imagine the destructive potential of that technology.
All of that is immensely destabilizing, at least potentially, and, as Leo says, has the potential to impact the history of humanity as much as the industrial revolution did, if not more.
But while the pope focuses on AI, I’d like to propose to him another technology issue impacting particularly the Church herself: Bishops, and social media.
Pillar readers know well that actual governance issues seemed to be a factor in his eventual removal from office. But the story of Bishop Joseph Strickland can’t be told without reference to his frequent social media use, and his eventual post about “reject[ing]” the leadership of the Roman Pontiff, or at least Francis’ alleged program of “undermining the deposit of faith.”
His posting habits put Strickland at ever more frequent odds with the episcopal hierarchy of the Church, whom he eventually began to flag as being insufficiently courageous and truthful.
By the accounts of those who know him, Strickland’s initial efforts to raise criticism during the pontificate of Pope Francis were impacted dramatically by his social media usage, where algorithmic prioritization gives preeminence to the most hyperbolic or polemical version of a narrative, and incentivizes with dopamine feedback every user to make his points in ever more bombastic color and image, regardless of the real world consequences.
Everyone knows people in their families for whom that kind of social media interaction has become a kind of a mindvirus, and bishops are not exempt from the possibility either.
Strickland does not see things that way, in fairness, but since his removal from office, his friends have frequently told The Pillar that they suspect things would have gone very differently for the bishop without the effect of social media on his personality and public voice.
But while Catholics watched the half-speed car crash of the Strickland affair play out, they were treated to other bizarre and unusual circumstances involving bishops and social media.
Consider, for example, the unusual twitter.com habits of Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio, who in May 2024 apologized for comments on social media that were flagged by commenters as anti-Semitic, especially a confusing tweet which asserted without explanation that “The Holocaust was already forgotten for Jews and everyone else.”
Not for the first time in recent years, the archbishop found himself issuing a statement of regret for his off-the-cuff remarks on twitter.com, while archdiocesan officials found themselves keen to clarify that Garcia-Siller’s remarks were from his “personal account,” and “not the official account of the Archdiocese of San Antonio.”
What’s not clear, but has been asked, is whether Garcia-Siller’s tweets were evidence of a problem of some kind, one meriting some pastoral attention or engagement. And since the archbishop’s account has now been deleted, the present status of things is yet unknown.
Meanwhile, online Catholics who followed the saga of now-resigned Bishop Richard Stika have long maintained that the bishop’s erratic and trenchant behavior on social media, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, was in hindsight a public telegraph of the ways in which he was accused of dealing with priest and staff in the Knoxville diocese, and that an evaluation or intervention for the bishop based upon his social media activity might have saved the Church in Knoxville from enduring some very difficult years with their embattled bishop.
And last month, commenters on reddit.com flagged a different kind of situation involving a bishop’s social media — a Reddit poster noted the case of a U.S. bishop whose official twitter.com account followed only three profiles, two of which seemed dedicated to posting explicit pornography. The reddit post about that was screenshotted and texted to all corners of the Church, judging from the very high number of readers who saw fit to bring it to The Pillar’s attention.
After the posting got some attention, the bishop no longer follows those profiles, with his diocesan spokesman telling The Pillar yesterday that the bishop’s account “was hacked,” and that “he obviously did not, himself, follow the inappropriate accounts.”
Instead, “that was done by whoever gained access to his account,” the spokesman said, adding that the hacker also “blocked the USCCB account and the accounts of Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.”
The interloper also apparently prevented the bishop from sending “any posts from his X account in recent weeks,” according to his diocese — although according to The Pillar’s review, the bishop has posted pictures and scriptural excerpts regularly, every few days at least, for the whole of 2025.
There was one bishop — Strickland, actually — who was demonstrably hacked earlier this year, by a scammer pushing a phony crypto coin — $CHRIST Coin, the “official Christian coin.”
But Strickland got control of his account, and made clear that the hacker “is NOT ME and I have no knowledge of this bit coin promotion.”
And it is a very specific kind of hacker who gains access to a bishop’s social media account, blocks a couple of ecclesiastical accounts, apparently prevents a bishop from tweeting, and then follows some pornography-posting-profiles, without using the hacked account for any other clear purpose.
I suspect, if nothing else, that this bishop isn’t the first to point to hackers in similar situations.
Now, astute readers will note I haven’t named the bishop in this case. That’s right, I haven’t, for two reasons: One, if he’s the victim of a crime like hacking, he needn’t be named for the story to be told. Two, the point is about the way the Church handles these things — a topic I want to discuss — but naming the bishop seems to our newsroom unnecessary in this case, and possibly unfair. This isn’t evidence of living a double life, it’s a coin toss of someone (allegedly) being hacked, or committing a sin accidentally in public, and then claiming a hacker did it.
These things are judged editorially on a case-by-case, and in this case, that’s where we land. You might disagree with that editorial decision, but there it is.
But if such hackers are targeting bishops, the matter should be taken seriously. And if they’re not, well, the implications of that should be considered as well.
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Any discussion of the episcopal use of social media has to consider Bishop Silvio Baez, an exiled auxiliary bishop of Managua, who mostly uses his social media presence to encourage Catholics persecuted in Nicaragua, and to call attention to their circumstance.
And everyone knows the memelord apostle of Oz, Bishop Richard Umbers, who mixes catechesis with slices of life, and a surprising number of memes for a gen-xer.
There is also the social media bishop himself, Bishop Robert Barron, whose trademark, “Friends…” postings might come off as a little corporate, but who is nevertheless the O.G. of clerics-on-the-internet, and who generates an amount of controversy commensurate with that role.
But here’s what I think is worth considering. Social media manages, in many cases, to bring the humanity of the Church’s episcopate much closer to the lay Catholics who follow them — or at least, slices of their episcopal humanity, incidentally selective, if not curated.
In some cases, that can be evangelical — there’s a reason why people like Umbers and Barron seem to attract Catholics and non-Catholics looking for a model of the Christian life.
But when things go wrong, as in the case of the apparently-porn-hacked-bishop, or the polemics of Stika, or regret-tweets of Garcia-Siller, the problem is that not enough has been seen: Catholics have seen evidence of a problem, but no evidence of a solution, either one born of justice, or one born of sincere pastoral and fraternal care.
That can lead to a kind of scandal in itself, because it gives the impression — accurate or not — that personnel issues in the episcopate, evidenced by their own social media postings, go unaddressed or unrecognized — memory-holed, basically — perhaps because it’d be a bit rude for anyone to speak them out loud.
The problem with that, of course, is that letting personnel issues go unspoken and festering is what gave the Church McCarrick. And it can give rise to other kinds of issues too, especially given the correlation between spiraling social media conduct and mental health crises. In short, when there’s good publicly-evident reason to wonder about that, it’s natural for Catholics to hope they’ll know that something is being done, or that someone in authority is monitoring the situation.
I’m not sure what exactly Pope Leo ought to do here, but it’s not-for-no-reason that dioceses have seen fit to try developing social media policies for their clergy: to protect against liability, sure, but also — one hopes — to help ensure priests, living on their own with little accountability, don’t fall into rabbit holes of sin, or self-destruction.
Sometimes diocesan policies have worked, and sometimes they’ve been draconian, unreasonable, and inflexible. But there is good reason to try paying attention to social media in the Church.
And as Leo gives his attention to AI, the real-life postings of his brother bishops probably merit some consideration too.
Especially with all those hackers out there.
People used to be interesting
Meanwhile, it’s graduation season, and while I wasn’t invited to give any commencement addresses — for very good reason — I do have a few things to say. So I’ve decided I might as well give here my unsolicited advice to the new and recent graduates of the class of 2025.
Here it is.
First, as you start out in life, pray. Go to confession regularly, make a daily Mass habit, pray the breviary and read Scripture. You can set patterns for your life right now, and later you’ll be glad you did. Plus, God is the author of all life, loves you intimately, and made you to know and love him — so you might as well do the thing for which you were created.
Next: Make friends. Early in my career, a mentor told me that all the successes of his later life came through the friendships he made in his 20s and 30s.
On the other side of 40, I can see that’s true for me, too.
I am nowhere without my friends. But here’s the key: Don’t “network.” Don’t just look for people who seem like they can do something for you. Don’t start every conversation asking people what they do, and then send thirsty follow-up emails to successful people you met glancingly at some event. Just make friends.
Hang out with people. Drink beer with people. Make brunch for people. Have them over. Go to their house. Camp with them. Make friends. And make friends because friendship is good.
It will probably turn out that the best things in life are the ones you do with your friends, but that’s only true if the friendships are real, not long-term investments in making money or getting someplace.
Third: Pursue a path. Don’t sit on it. Don’t hem and haw. Don’t wait for St. Thérèse to bring you hundreds of roses before you act.
If you think you’re called to be a Dominican, apply to the Dominicans, instead of just posting St. Thomas quotes on your Instagram or debating liturgy on twitter.com.
If you think you’re called to diocesan priesthood, apply to the diocese. If you think you’re called to the Jesuits… well, that’s good, too. (I kid, of course! I kid.)
If you think God wants you to be married, consider moving to places with lots of young single people. Maybe go to grad school at a Newman guide college, where engagements can usually be found near the adoration chapel.
Dating is harder nowadays because of the apps, and whatnot — it really does strike me as a dystopian wasteland — but try everything to find real-life pockets of human beings who also want to be married. If you’re not sure how to date, Ed has some good advice.
Fourth: Chastity is better. Be chaste. If you haven’t been, just go to confession and try again.
Fifth: Do what makes you happy. Here’s what I mean: In the Christian life, especially when we’re young, we have a tendency sometimes to over-spiritualize every single decision. And sometimes we can start thinking there is some life path we “should” pursue because it’s the one God most wants for us, even if it makes us miserable. We can beat ourselves up for not being very good at following it. And that can throw us into various existential crises, or push us into commitments we don’t actually want to make.
God doesn’t want you to be miserable. If you’re living the life of grace, going to confession regularly, going to Mass, making friends — and miserable all the time on the road you’ve taken — it’s probably not the path for you.
BUT
Sixth: There are hard days in everything. There are hard seasons in everything. Don’t let one hard day, or even one hard season, discourage you from what you’re pursuing. And actually, the cross of suffering gives meaning to relationships.
BUT
Seventh: Don’t be afraid to change paths. I’ve had a couple of careers. Most not predictable. It’s virtually impossible to plan further down the road than five years, and even that is pretty hard to do. Don’t be afraid to try something new.
Eighth: Travel. Be a pilgrim. Go to World Youth Day, even if you’re not a big-Mass-in-a-stadium kind of person. Or the Camino. Or Chartres. Or Chimayo. Just be a pilgrim. Bring your friends.
Ninth: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
That’s who you want to be. Not who a weird grifty influencer says you should be.
Next: Put some money every month, even if it’s $10, into a Roth IRA. Your dad will be so proud. He’ll probably match it. But remember to be generous with the poor. Whatever you have belongs to God, and if someone else needs it more than you, they have a right to it.
Also: Ditch your phone when you can. Read books without it. Go for a hike without it. Spend the weekend camping without it. All of that will fix the brainworms of phone addiction, and make you happier. You’ll also be a more interesting person if you try to figure out stuff like directions and restaurants and conversation without your phone. People used to be really interesting. Trust me.
Finally: Don’t call it the popemobile. Super lame.
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Please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
Stop trying to make the popemobile not happen. It's not going to not happen.
Sorry, but "popemobile" is exactly the kind of Catholic kitsch I have a soft-spot for -- a term of the faithful used with tongue planted slightly in cheek even as we chant Vespers. I'm gonna keep using it.
Also, you should have mentioned Bishop Flores, who has the best episcopal Twitter handle: Amigo de Frodo.