Never Without His Rosary or His Pistol

In a landmark address delivered during the Jubilee of Hope in 2025, Pope Leo XIV turned the world’s attention to the Eastern Churches—not only to honor their sacred past but to demand a reckoning with their precarious future. Among his most urgent appeals was a renewed call to preserve and promote the heritage of Eastern Christians living in diaspora. “In our own day,” he warned, “many of our Eastern brothers and sisters… risk losing not only their native lands, but also, when they reach the West, their religious identity.” Pope Leo drew explicitly on the legacy of his namesake, Leo XIII, whose 1894 encyclical Orientalium Dignitas called the Eastern Churches “a treasure for the universal Church” and denounced any attempt to Latinize them as “a form of ecclesiastical violence.”