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St Patrick’s, Soho, London. Photograph: Rhys Tranter

On Saturday, I took a train to London to attend Summit 2026 at St Patrick’s church in Soho. Centred around the theme of Freedom of Heart: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life, and presented a rich lineup of talks, reflections, and Q&As across topics like hope, inner freedom, and applying spiritual principles to active life in the world.

The plenary speakers began the day with two morning presentations. We heard from Bishop Erik Varden—who recently delivered the Lenten Spiritual Exercises for Pope Leo XIV in Rome—and Fr Jacques Philippe, a cheerful, popular author of books on prayer who draws deeply from the Carmelite tradition. Among the afternoon sessions were talks by two sharp and energetic Dominican nuns, Sr Carino Hodder and Sr Lucy Cahill, whose candid approach to the Rule of St Augustine was entertaining and inspiring. Archbishop Richard Moth was also in attendance for part of the day.

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Today the Vatican has published Magnifica Humanitas, the first Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIV.

It has been released on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which was a rallying call to safeguard human dignity at the height of Industrial Revolution.

The new document calls for a careful and prudent approach to our current digital revolution in order to “safeguard the human person in the time of artificial intelligence”:

Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.

— Magnifica Humanitas, 233

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Photograph: Rhys Tranter

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, shares this on art, the true and the beautiful:

“Art, therefore, does not deal only with what is externally beautiful and harmonious, although this is rightly considered to be its primary end (CCC 250I). Gertrud von le Fort, one of the greatest Catholic authors of our [just-completed] century, says of writing (and similar things can be said also of the other arts) that it shares with the Christian faith the ‘irresistible inclination to embrace the ostracized and the condemned, even the guilty who are condemned, to accompany on their confused path to the abyss those who have gone astray, to draw the failing and the dying to its heart. […] Genuine poetry remains, unflinchingly, the great lover of the guilty and the lost.’”

Perhaps the words of this author will help us to understand better some of the ways of contemporary art and to see more clearly where today’s artists, in their often bewildering quests, are on the trail of the Savior’s truth.

— Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Vol. III: Life in Christ.

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Photograph: Rhys Tranter

In a conversation that touches on a range of contemporary political topics, Joseph Tulloch talks to scholar James K. A. Smith about the enduring influence of St Augustine as a theologian and philosopher.

Towards the end of their time together, Tulloch asks Smith, who shares an alma mater with Pope Leo XIV, what kind of influence Villanova University may have had on their thinking:

“It is precisely this German and French milieu that kept returning to the thought of Saint Augustine in the 20th century. I mean, it’s fascinating. People like Heidegger, Camus, Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard – the last three of whom, by the way, are all connected to Algeria in some way. Born in Algeria or working there as adults, they became intellectual stars in France in the middle of the 20th century, and they all had occasion to return to the thought of Saint Augustine. So that is the philosophical milieu which would have shaped part of Pope Leo’s training.”

Source: Vatican News

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Photograph: Rhys Tranter

“The Greek word for alms, eleemosyne, comes from éleos, meaning compassion and mercy. Various circumstances have combined to change this meaning so that almsgiving is often regarded as a cold act, with no love in it. But almsgiving in the proper sense means realizing the needs of others and letting them share in one’s own goods. Who would say that there will not always be others who need help, especially spiritual help, support, consolation, fraternity, love? The world is always very poor, as far as love is concerned”

— St John Paul II, 28 March 1979

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Photograph: Rhys Tranter

Divine Mercy Sunday. We travel to Chapter Arts Centre to see Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001), which is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. It was an important film for both of us when we were younger. Audrey Tautou’s iconic performance of the heroic and vulnerable Amélie is still a pleasure to watch, while Jeunet’s kinetic energy and rich colour palette remains the vision of Paris for every tourist. Moving, joyful, and exuberant.

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Fr John Nepil, To Heights and Unto Depths: Letters from the Colorado Trail. Photograph: Rhys Tranter
Fr John Nepil, To Heights and Unto Depths: Letters from the Colorado Trail. Photograph: Rhys Tranter

Taken from Fr John Nepil‘s To Heights and Unto Depths: Letters from the Colorado Trail:

“Creation felt symphonic Everything from the wildflowers below to the stratus clouds above spoke of order and design. The ancients had a word for this-one that would in time become intensely meaningful for Christians. They called it logos.

Some words are impossible to translate and logos is to be counted among them. Polyvalent in its essence, logos can be defined as ‘word, speech, discourse, thought, reason, and meaning’. Rooted in the verb legein (‘to gather, bind, link, or unite’), logos was employed by the Greeks to describe the unifying link of all creation. First described by Heraclitus around 500 b.c., logos was more than a principle of unity; it was the idea upon which the wise man lived. Plato would develop this intuition of logos as the mind, distinguishing it as the agent of creation that he called the demiurge. Stoic philosophers such as Cleante and Seneca saw in it the harmony of the universe, governed by the divine spirit. And at the end of the pre-Christian era, the great Jewish philosopher Philo would see the logos as the first power emanating from God, calling it ‘the bond of the universe’.”