“The Shroud of Turin: An Immersive Experience,” a $5 million, 10,000-square-foot museum on the chancery campus of the Diocese of Orange in Southern California opened to visitors on Nov. 19, 2025. / Credit: Everett Johnson, Diocese of Orange

Los Angeles, California, Nov 19, 2025 / 16:53 pm (CNA).

“The Shroud of Turin: An Immersive Experience,” a $5 million, 10,000-square-foot museum on the chancery campus of the Diocese of Orange in Southern California, opened to visitors Wednesday.  

The museum is presented by Papaian Studios in partnership with the Diocese of Orange and Othonia Inc., an international team of specialists dedicated to exploring and sharing the mystery of the Shroud of Turin.

The 90-minute experience introduces visitors to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with a special focus on the Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial cloth of Christ.

Inspired by the advanced technology incorporated in “Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience” and the “Immersive King Tut,” the museum features 360-degree projection-room theaters as well as shroud replicas, interactive kiosks, a life-sized corpus, and a variety of artwork.  

Jason Pearson of FiveHive Studios, which offers AI special effects and animation services, is a Catholic convert who worked with Othonia, a team of shroud specialists, to design the museum.  Among his movie credits is Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ.” He has long had an interest in the shroud and has been a volunteer guide at the Shroud Center of Southern California located at the Santiago Retreat Center, also in the Diocese of Orange.

“Using technology on display like that of the Van Gogh or King Tut exhibits, we’re doing things that have never been done before,” Pearson told CNA. “Whether it be Jesus walking on water or through the streets of Jerusalem, or in the tomb at the moment of the Resurrection, we make use of sound and projections so that the visitor feels like he’s going back into a time machine and experiencing these things himself.”

The museum is designed for everyone, Pearson continued, even those who have no religious background at all. 

Located on the second floor of the campus’ Richard H. Pickup Cultural Center, the museum has three theater rooms. Using surround sound and images, including on the floor, the first room introduces the visitor to the person of Jesus Christ through presentation of 12 stories from his life, but each one is selected to show Christ’s connection to the supernatural (e.g. the Transfiguration). The next introduces the visitor to the shroud itself, including proof of its authenticity and what it tells us about the sufferings of Christ. The third is devoted to the Resurrection leading the viewer to ponder a pointed question: Who do you believe the man on the shroud is?

The third theater exits into the museum area, which includes displays of reproductions of items that were part of the passion of Christ, including a flagellum (whip), the crown of thorns and nails, as well as a reproduction of what the tomb of Christ might have looked like.

Other exhibits include an AI presentation of Secondo Pia (1855–1941) who, while photographing the shroud in 1898, discovered that its negative image offered a clearer image of the man on the shroud with a detail in his face that could not been seen by the naked eye. Another traces the history of the iconography of Christ, demonstrating how accurate, when comparing it to the shroud image, many of the icons were. And, one compares the Sudarium of Oviedo, or the facial cloth that covered Christ’s face after his death, to the image on the shroud.

Pearson hopes that the museum will be a prototype for additional shroud museums in different regions of the country. Inquiries have been made about establishing shroud museums from places as far away as Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

One portion of the museum is dedicated to the science of the shroud, and two kiosks allow visitors to ask questions of a digital Father Robert Spitzer, who has extensively researched the shroud over the past 20 years. Spitzer, who has an office at Christ Cathedral, noted that he was pleased with the museum’s opening. “It gets the pedagogy right, it’s biblically accurate, and they tell me the visual imagery is amazing.” (Spitzer has gone blind in recent years.)

He continued: “And while we welcome anyone, we especially hope many young people will come to learn about the shroud and lead many to come to know more deeply the person of Jesus Christ.”

Nora Creech is on the leadership team of Othonia and helped develop content for the museum. “We want people to come with an open mind, explore, and ask questions. We want them to ask, ‘Who is the man of the shroud?’” she said.

One special target group of the museum, Creech said, is younger people, “many of whom have not been brought up with knowledge of who Jesus is. That is why we seek first to introduce people to Jesus so that they will become interested in his burial shroud.”

Pearson agreed and related the story of two young women who visited the Shroud Center and began weeping, asking: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about him?”

But while the shroud is important in showing us what Jesus suffered, Creech continued, we also need the Church and the Scriptures “to learn why he suffered.”

Orange Auxiliary Bishop Timothy Freyer, who played a key role in bringing the museum to Christ Cathedral, noted that his favorite feature was the reproduction of the crown of thorns, which, contrary to most artistic renditions, was actually shaped like a helmet or cap. He continued: “I’ve been impressed with the entire exhibition. It is very engaging, and I believe it will be an important tool in helping visitors come to know Christ better.”

Also among those excited to see the opening of the museum was Gus Accetta, a physician who has devoted much of his free time to studying the shroud. In 1996, he founded the Shroud Center in Huntington Beach, since relocated to the Santiago Retreat Center and welcoming 25,000 visitors annually.

“It’s a wonderful exhibit,” he said. It not only looks at the shroud but the whole life of Christ, of which the shroud is just a part.”

The Shroud of Turin experience will be on display at Christ Cathedral at least through 2030. The museum is located on Christ Cathedral campus, 12141 Lewis St., Garden Grove, California, a few miles away from Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center. For more information, visit the website www.theshroudexperience.com.

St. Patrick Cathedral in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina. / Credit: Diocese of Charlotte

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 19, 2025 / 16:23 pm (CNA).

Bishop Michael T. Martin of the Diocese of Charlotte issued a Mass dispensation for any person who fears he or she may be subject to deportation and called for a day of prayer and fasting for migrants as immigration enforcement ramps up throughout North Carolina.

The bishop published the statement on Nov. 18 telling those “who are afraid to come to church” out of fear they could be deported “are not obligated to attend Mass.” These conditions, he said, are “circumstances beyond your control.”

Martin said the Church has always taught that the normal Sunday Mass obligation does not apply when a person cannot attend due to situations he or she does not control.

“I encourage you to take consolation in Jesus’ refrain when the disciples were in the boat being swamped by stormy seas: ‘Do not be afraid!’ (Mt 14:27),” Martin added. “Your brothers and sisters are praying with you, and on your behalf, to God who desires our citizenship together in heaven and longs to see us live in harmony with each other on earth.”

The diocesan statement comes after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched Operation Charlotte’s Web late last week, which escalated immigration enforcement in North Carolina.

Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, said in a statement that the operation was launched to “ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed” and said “Americans should be able to live without fear of violent criminal illegal aliens hurting them, their families, or their neighbors.”

DHS announced more than 130 arrests from the operation as of Nov. 17. A DHS spokesperson said the operation is “removing the worst of the worst.” The department published the names of 11 detainees, which it alleged included known gang members and people charged with assault, larceny, intoxicated driving, and other crimes.

President Donald Trump’s administration eliminated guidelines that previously treated churches as “sensitive locations” for immigration enforcement in January.

Nate Madden, principal deputy assistant secretary for communications at DHS, told CNA on Nov. 17 that “when we are pursuing the worst of the worst” who have criminal histories, some suspects “run to places where they think they will be able to evade law enforcement or where they think that law enforcement will be afraid to pursue them because of the appearance.”

A DHS spokesperson said in a statement to CNA in July that enforcement in houses of worship would be “extremely rare” and “our officers use discretion.” She said officers still need approval from a secondary supervisor before taking action at a church.

Nov. 21: Day of prayer and fasting for migrants

In the diocesan statement, Martin asked his diocese to observe a day of prayer and fasting on Friday, Nov. 21, in solidarity with migrants around the world.

The bishop asked people to contact loved ones at risk of deportation to “assure them of our love and care for them” and asked Catholics to contact lawmakers in both parties to encourage them to pass immigration reform that adheres to the common good.

He also asked people not to vilify federal agents.

“While I have no words to practically address the fear and uncertainty that many are feeling with the increased presence of federal immigration officials in the Charlotte metro area, I want to call upon all Catholics and people of goodwill to give witness to the message of Jesus,” Martin said.

“Our faith teaches us to come to the aid of the poor, marginalized, and most vulnerable,” the bishop continued. “‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Mt 25:35).”

Martin is currently in Rome and said yesterday that he planned to meet with Pope Leo XIV today and ask him to pray for the people of the diocese and migrants, “especially during this challenging time.”

“Please be assured that we will get through this together, if we focus our attention on the only one, Jesus Christ, who can save us all,” Martin said.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved a special message on Nov. 12 at its Fall Plenary Assembly that affirmed: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” More than 95% of bishops approved the message, with 216 voting in favor, just five voting against, and three abstaining.

Pope Leo XIV on Nov. 18 urged Americans to listen to the message from the nation’s bishops.

“When people are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least — and there’s been some violence, unfortunately — I think that the bishops have been very clear in what they said,” Leo said.

null / Credit: Joe Belanger/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Nov 19, 2025 / 12:23 pm (CNA).

The Maine State Supreme Court is considering whether to give a mother the right to take her daughter to church amid a dispute between the mother and her daughter’s father. 

Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Florida-based legal group, said in a press release that the Portland District Court ruled it was “psychologically unsafe” for Emily Bickford to take her 12-year-old daughter to a Christian church called Calvary Chapel in the Portland area.

The girl’s father, Matthew Bradeen, had objected to his daughter’s being taken to the institution; in a broad order, the state district court had awarded him “the right to make final decisions regarding [the daughter’s] participation in other churches and religious organizations” as well.  

The ruling “completely stripped” Bickford of the right to make decisions over her daughter’s religious upbringing, Liberty Counsel said in a filing with the state Supreme Court. 

Bradeen is “demonstrably and openly hostile” to his daughter receiving instruction about the Bible, the filing said, and has evinced “wholesale objections to the Old Testament and the New Testament.” 

Precedent elsewhere, the filing said, holds that the “religious beliefs of one parent cannot be the basis for preferring one parent over the other” in custody disputes. 

News Center Maine reported that Bradeen was reportedly moved to seek the custody order when his daughter “started having severe panic attacks and [exhibiting] alarming psychological signs” after she began attending the church, including allegedly “leaving notes around the house that said ‘the rapture is coming.’”

Attorney Michelle King argued that precedent says courts “don’t have to wait for it to be so severe that a child suffers irreparable emotional harm” before issuing a custody order in such disputes.

Liberty Counsel, meanwhile, asked the state Supreme Court to reverse the lower court’s order.

The district court decision is “a direct infringement on [Bickford’s] right to direct the religious upbringing of her child,” the group said.

Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said the court order violates the First Amendment.

“The breadth of this court order is breathtaking because it even prohibits contact with the Bible, religious literature, or religious philosophy,” he alleged in the group’s press release. “The custody order cannot prohibit Bickford from taking her daughter to church. The implications of this order pose a serious threat to religious freedom.”

Bickford, meanwhile, told reporters after the state Supreme Court ruling that the dispute “affects not only our family but the families of all Christian children.”

Pierre Louvrier (center) speaks during the “Schuman Plan 2.0 — Europe’s Role in a Fragmented World” debate at the European Parliament, Nov. 11, 2025. / Credit: Maria Grazia Ricciardi

EWTN News, Nov 19, 2025 / 09:45 am (CNA).

A peace plan inspired by Venerable Robert Schuman was proposed at the European Parliament, envisioning cooperation across the Northern Hemisphere.

Ruth Pakaluk with her husband and five of their children. / Credit: Photo courtesy of the Pakaluk family

National Catholic Register, Nov 19, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).

To kids in the neighborhood east of Interstate 290 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ruth Pakaluk was the mom who baked brownies and blondies for everyone after school and whose home was the starting point for games and fun.

“She was like the ‘block mom,’” her husband, Michael Pakaluk, an author and professor at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, told the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner.

To the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Ruth Pakaluk’s life merits further investigation to see whether someday the Church should declare her a saint.

The pro-life activist, Catholic convert, mother of seven, and Harvard graduate died of breast cancer in 1998 at 41. Now, the Diocese of Worcester, where she was living at the time of her death, has the approval of the Vatican’s saints’ dicastery to undertake a formal inquiry into her life, the next step along the path to a possible canonization.

Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the dicastery, referred to Pakaluk as a “servant of God” in a letter to the diocese dated Sept. 29 authorizing the inquiry.

The dicastery’s “nihil obstat” (“nothing stands in the way”) means that supporters of her cause have established her “reputation for sanctity” and “the importance of the cause for the Church,” as set forth in the 1983 Vatican document Normae Servandae In Inquisitionibus Ab Episcopis Faciendis In Causis Sanctorum.

Canonization, in which the Church solemnly declares that a person is in heaven, is likely a long way off, if it happens, and would eventually require two miracles attributed to her intercession. The next step is for the U.S. bishops to vote on her cause. If they approve it, the formal diocesan inquiry can begin.

From atheist to Catholic

Ruth Van Kooy was born on March 19, 1957, in northern New Jersey and grew up there, mostly in Norwood, near the New York state line. Half Dutch, half Scottish, she attended a Presbyterian church as a child.

She went to Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan, where she was, according to a website about her life, a straight-A student who played the oboe, violin, and bass drum. She also played field hockey, sang in regional choirs, and “and produced, directed, and acted in numerous plays and musicals,” the website says. She graduated in 1975.

She was an atheist (“or near to it,” her husband writes) and an enthusiastic supporter of legal abortion when she met Michael Pakaluk, a fellow sophomore at Harvard College, during the fall of 1976. He had been raised in a nominally Catholic home but also considered himself a nonbeliever.

Even so, both were committed to pursuing the truth, which led them eventually to Christianity.

They married the summer after their junior year, at a Presbyterian church. But by their last semester at Harvard, they had begun attending Mass at a Catholic church. Ruth entered the Church on Christmas Eve in 1980, while Michael went to confession and took up life as a Catholic again. A few years later, both became supernumeraries of Opus Dei.

In 1982, while Michael was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard, Ruth — by then a young mom with a baby boy — helped start a pro-life group at Harvard. She joined the board of directors of Massachusetts Citizens for Life in 1984, and she eventually served as its president from 1987 to 1991.

Admirers remember her as an effective debater on college campuses, giving what Boston College philosophy professor and Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft called, in his introduction to a 2011 book of her letters that her husband edited called “The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God,” “the most persuasive, irresistible, and winsome pro-life talks I have ever heard.” 

During the early 1990s, Ruth organized opposition to a Planned Parenthood sex-education curriculum proposed for Worcester public schools, which helped persuade the Worcester School Committee, the locally elected board that oversees the school district, to reject the curriculum. In 1993, a year after the committee vote, she also recruited a like-minded mom to run for a school committee and managed her successful campaign.

Dwight Duncan, a friend of the family who is the postulator of her cause, responsible for conducting what the Vatican calls “thorough investigations” into her life, said Ruth rarely put herself forward.

“One of the things about Ruth that strikes me in retrospect is that she was kind of low-key. She wasn’t assertive in personal dealings. She wasn’t showy or aggressive. She wasn’t flashy,” Duncan said. “But if she was front and center, like a debate or a speech or something, she was a strong, powerful woman.”

40-year-old carpets

In 1988, the couple and their then-four children moved from Cambridge to Worcester, about 45 miles to the west, where Michael had gotten a job teaching at Clark University. They lived “in a poor neighborhood in a home with 40-year-old carpets and no hot running water,” as Michael describes it in an online timeline of Ruth’s life.

Max Pakaluk, her second child, now 42, told the Register that his family’s house was a magnet for children in the neighborhood, many of them living in single-mother homes, who were drawn by the baked goods Ruth made and liberally distributed.

Michael Pakaluk said Ruth was disturbed by the learning gap she saw developing between her own children, who read often, and the neighborhood children, who didn’t, so she required kids who visited the home to read a book before they could go outside.

In summertime, she’d cram 10 or so kids into an Oldsmobile station wagon for the less-than-a-mile trip to Bell Pond in Worcester, where the kids would play, Max recalled.

Grace Cheffers, a friend who met Ruth at a pro-life parish event during the early 1990s, said Ruth was approachable and friendly but also creative in figuring out ways young moms and their families could meet.

Ruth organized gatherings of mothers and children at Notre Dame Cemetery in Worcester, where the families would say the rosary and the kids would run around while the moms went on walks and talked.

Cheffers recalled that the prevailing culture at the time suggested that women should be out working and having a career rather than just being a stay-at-home mom, but Ruth dismissed such ideas.

“Even though she was very well-educated and highly intelligent, she found joy in staying at home and taking care of her kids. And she was very unapologetic about it,” Cheffers said.

Cheffers, who has 11 children, said she learned parenting tips from Ruth.

“She was never scandalized by anything her children did. She was clear-eyed about the human condition,” Cheffers said. “Kids can do all sorts of things, and it doesn’t help to act shocked and upset. That just makes it worse for them.”

Cheffers said she also learned from Ruth how to articulate better why she did what she did.

“She was a deep thinker. She chose her words carefully. She was a natural teacher. She had great formation, and she really knew her faith,” Cheffers said.

One example: When Cheffers once asked Ruth why she went to daily Mass, Ruth immediately offered two reasons: one personal, related to the crib death of her infant son Thomas in November 1989, and one universal.

“She told me that going to Mass and receiving daily Communion was the closest she could be to Thomas while she was still on this earth,” Cheffers said.

The second reason: “She said that the two most important events in human history — the Incarnation and redemption — occur at every Mass. Why would you want to be anywhere else?”

Ruth often went to the 12:10 p.m. daily Mass at the Cathedral of St. Paul, after which she would stay up to an hour praying, said Bishop Richard Reidy, who now leads the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, but at the time was rector of the Worcester cathedral and the Pakaluk family’s pastor.

Ruth served as director of religious education for the cathedral parish. While Catholic religious education at the time was notoriously light on substance, Ruth made sure the kids learned doctrine, and she made it fun. She developed what she called “Quiz Game,” a parish-wide competition for kids in the program that eventually drew students from outside the parish.

“She ran a dynamic program, emphasizing the substance of the faith and the joy of living it,” Reidy said.

She led parish trips on the cheap for up to 30 kids to New York City and New Hampshire, among other places, combining culture, hiking, and religion.

Max Pakaluk described his mother as “someone who wanted to do things.”

“She didn’t have a lot of tolerance for laziness. I don’t think she understood laziness. We’re all here for so much time. There’s so many good things you could be doing. Why would you be wasting time?” Max said. “She was always trying to get people to do things.”

No complaints

Admirers of Ruth say that while many of her pursuits might seem ordinary — wife, mother, volunteer — she lived them in an extraordinary way.

Saints not killed for the faith as martyrs are those who “give outstanding testimony to the kingdom of heaven … by the heroic practice of virtues,” according to St. John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister.

So what were Ruth Pakaluk’s virtues?

Friends and family describe, among other things, an intense prayer life, trust in God through difficulties, interest in the welfare of others, gratitude, and a refusal to complain about her troubles.

In October 1991, Ruth was diagnosed with breast cancer, which eventually spread to other parts of her body. She lived with it about seven more years.

But her son Max said he doesn’t remember life changing much until his mother became bedridden not long before she died.

“Mostly I think she tried not to make a big deal about it. She just tried to act like there was nothing wrong,” Max said.

Along with her kids, she climbed Mount Washington, the steep, 6,000-foot-plus highest peak in New England notorious for its sudden weather changes, with a metal rod in her leg.

“But almost as remarkable as that, about two months before she died, she climbed down Mount Washington,” Michael Pakaluk said by text. “She took the shuttle up, but she climbed down via the Lion Head Trail. This is a very rugged, difficult trail. When I climbed it two years ago, I was scratching my head and wondering how she ever did it.”

She continued making trips with the family to the March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January, including one in 1998, the year she died, not long after a round of chemotherapy.

Fran Hogan, now 79, a commercial real estate lawyer and former president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, walked with Ruth during the march that year. Hogan, who was carrying a heavy pocketbook, didn’t know about Ruth’s debilitating treatment.

“It was over my left shoulder. And I complained bitterly about how heavy that pocketbook was,” Hogan said. “Ruth just laughed. She never complained. Never said a word.”

“And we got to the Supreme Court building and she collapsed.”

Ruth was hospitalized.

People who knew her say Ruth accepted her suffering without questioning it.

“When she knew she had terminal cancer, it’s amazing how calmly they took all of that, and I guess that’s the faith behind it,” said her mother-in-law, Valerie Pakaluk, 92, who is planning to serve as secretary-treasurer of the nonprofit foundation that will direct Ruth’s cause of canonization.

“I think there’s no question that the way she handled her illness was extremely heroic,” her son Max said.

Her attitude, Max said, can be summed up this way: “I am not going to give any indications that I’m sick. I am not going to be the center of attention here. I am not going to be causing difficulties here. Most of all, I am not going to be the reason my kids don’t have a normal life.”

She was unsentimental about her status, realizing that with six children, the youngest of whom was 5 years old, her husband would soon need help.

About a month before she died — on Sept. 23, 1998 — Ruth encouraged her husband Michael to remarry after she departed, and she even focused on a likely candidate — “calmly suggesting,” as The Catholic Free Press of the Diocese of Worcester put it in May 2019, that Harvard graduate student Catherine Hardy, whose parents were family friends — and whose middle name is Ruth — “might be the one to raise her children.”

Here’s how Michael describes it: “She took a deep breath and said, ‘I have for a long time thought that Catherine Hardy would make a good wife for you, and now I see that she has moved to Cambridge.’”

Catherine Pakaluk, as she is now known, married Michael in August 1999. She is an economist and associate professor at The Catholic University of America, where Michael, 67, is a full professor of political economy. Catherine and Michael, an occasional contributor to the Register, now have eight children of their own.

Michael and Ruth currently have 32 grandchildren.

A saint?

So was Ruth Pakaluk a saint?

Supporters of her cause who spoke to the Register were careful to say that they don’t want to declare her one before the Church decides through its formal process.

But they drop hints.

At her wake, her husband took a box of funeral prayer cards for Ruth and touched them to her body — which, in the event she is canonized, would make the prayer cards third-class relics.

“I always had this conviction — it’s strange — that she would be a canonized saint,” Michael Pakaluk, who said he is cooperating with Ruth’s cause but purposely not directing it, told the Register. “Obviously you can’t presume the judgment of the Church.”

Reidy also stopped short of calling her a saint without denying that she might be.

“I’m very delighted at the recent steps that have gone on, and we trust in Holy Mother Church,” Reidy said. “But she’s a great example, somebody to be held up.”

“If Ruth Pakaluk isn’t in heaven,” he said, “I am a little discouraged for the prospects of the likes of me.”

Twenty-seven years after Ruth’s funeral Mass, which Reidy celebrated before about 1,000 people, he recited from memory during a recent interview with the Register his description of her during his sermon: “To give life and to defend it. To have faith and to spread it. To be gifted, and to freely give of those gifts.”

This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If people do not see themselves as "caretakers of the garden of creation, we end up becoming its destroyers," Pope Leo XIV said.

As the U.N. Climate Conference continued in Brazil, the pope dedicated his weekly general audience talk Nov. 19 to explaining how Jesus' death and resurrection should lead Christians to "a spirituality of integral ecology," which seeks the good of the human person and the planet.

Believing in Christ does not isolate Christians from the world and its concerns, the pope said, but rather it motivates them to share with others how faith generates hope and action, including the kind of conversion needed to provide greater care for the poor and for the earth.

Without concrete commitments, he said, "the words of faith have no hold on reality, and the words of science remain outside the heart." 

"If we allow it, Christ's salvific act can transform all our relationships: with God, with other people and with creation," Pope Leo said in his English-language remarks.

Christians "must allow the seed of Christian hope to bear fruit, convert our hearts and influence the ways we respond to the issues that we face," including the pressing issue of climate change and, particularly, its impact on the world's poorest people.

"As followers of Jesus," he said, "we are called to promote lifestyles and policies that focus on the protection of human dignity and of all of creation."

"Christian hope responds to the demands of our time regarding the climate and the environment," he told Portuguese speakers.

The audience began with the reading of the Gospel of John's account of Mary Magdalene weeping near Jesus' tomb, not recognizing the risen Lord, but thinking he was the gardener. 

In some ways, Jesus is the gardener, the pope said. "The lost paradise is rediscovered by Jesus," who, like a seed buried in the ground, rises again and bears fruit.

Belief in the Resurrection and hope for the coming of God's kingdom "are the foundations for an ecological spirituality and conversion that change history and involve public commitment, placing Christians on the same side as so many people -- including many young people -- who have heard and felt resonate in their hearts the divine call to care for the poor and for the earth."

Pope Leo encouraged people at the audience to "invoke the Spirit to help us care, with the same faith, for our common home and for our hearts." 

Before his audience, the pope met privately with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who handed him a formal invitation to visit Chicago and several cans of "Da Pope" beer, produced by Burning Bush Brewery.

"We'll put that in the fridge," the pope is heard saying on a short video released by Vatican Media.

The governor told NBC 5 Chicago television that he and Pope Leo spoke about immigration. "He believes strongly that it is our obligation as human beings to stand up for one another and especially because immigrants often are the most vulnerable," Pritzker said.
 

Governor brings "Da Pope" to the pope

Before his general audience Nov. 19, Pope Leo met with Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who invited the pope to Chicago.

Blessed Carmelo De Palma. / Credit: Dicastery for the Causes of Saints

ACI Prensa Staff, Nov 18, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Father Carmelo De Palma, a priest known as the “hero of the confessional,” was beatified Nov. 15 in Bari, Italy.

Three women share their stories of experiences with abortion at the pro-life event at the European Parliament in Brussels, Oct. 15, 2025. / Credit: European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ)

EWTN News, Nov 17, 2025 / 10:06 am (CNA).

A historic pro-life conference in the European Parliament challenged the “My Voice, My Choice” initiative as debate intensifies over EU-funded cross-border abortion access.

A roadside wooden crucifix in Bavaria. / Credit: AC Wimmer/EWTN News

EWTN News, Nov 17, 2025 / 09:06 am (CNA).

A new report by OIDAC Europe documents 2,211 anti-Christian hate crimes across Europe in 2024, including a sharp spike in arson attacks on churches.

“The Charity of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary,” painted by Edmund Leighton, circa 1895. / Credit: Edmund Leighton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

CNA Staff, Nov 17, 2025 / 04:00 am (CNA).

A patron of secular Franciscans, St. Elizabeth of Hungary is especially beloved to Germans as well as the faithful of her native Hungary.