COMMENTARY: In a blunt address to diplomats, the new Pope defends the dignity of life, the family and the most vulnerable — calling the world to moral sanity.
by Jennifer Roback Morse May 28, 2025, at National Catholic Register
I am deeply thankful to Pope Leo XIV for coming out of the gate with honest, blunt talk about the most troubling questions the human race now faces. Speaking May 16 to diplomats assigned to the Holy See, Leo said:
“It is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies. This can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman, ‘a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.’ In addition, no one is exempted from striving to ensure respect for the dignity of every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.”
Pope Leo grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and he served as a missionary for a decade in Peru, where he also holds citizenship. So the Pope has seen firsthand the impact on the poor of anti-family policies, driven by homegrown and foreign elites, in underdeveloped foreign countries.
American citizens learned a lot about how destructive “reforms” are imposed from outside when Elon Musk’s DOGE exposed the use of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to promote abortion, contraception, and the promotion of gender ideology targeted at children in poor countries. All this in the name of “development.” One of the last gasps of the Biden administration was to threaten impoverished Sierra Leone with canceling more than $400 million in aid for things like rural electrification if that government didn’t repeal its protective laws against abortion.
Reiterating the teaching of Pope Leo XIII, from whom he took his name, this Pope reaffirmed a cornerstone of Catholic social teaching embraced by other faithful Christians and clear-minded observers: The family, not the atomized individual, is the building block of society. The family predates the state by thousands of years, and states that try to deform or replace the family are dooming their citizens to misery. The demographic collapse we’re seeing across the globe is just the most obvious and quantifiable measure of how toxic the ideology of the sexual revolution is proving to our species.
Other metrics include the global abortion epidemic, which has claimed more than 1.75 billion innocent lives since 1980, according to NumberofAbortions.com — a sobering site that includes a heartbreaking real-time ticker. The ubiquity of abortion, and its promotion by so many developed countries against the wishes of citizens in poor countries, is a massive global injustice. If the right to life itself is negotiable — if it can be waived to suit our sexual convenience — what other rights could ever be secure?
While divorce statistics have begun to… keep reading.
