On this 20th of May, 2025, in the solemn Roman setting of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, our Holy Father Leo XIV prayed in reflection before the tomb of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Freshly elected, the successor of Peter wished, in humility and apostolic continuity, to place his pontificate under the gaze and intercession of the one who, from the sword of persecution, was turned by divine grace into a herald of Christ.
And it was precisely on this mystery of grace that his homily centered. A sober, profound homily, nourished by the Word of God and the teaching of the Fathers, far from the rhetorical flourishes or empty discourses too often heard in recent years.
Grace First: Everything Begins with God
The Holy Father revisited the opening verses of the Epistle to the Romans: Paul confesses that he received the grace of the call. It is God who loved him first, who chose him even as he hated Christ and persecuted the Church. Leo XIV, with the gentle firmness already recognized in him, recalled this simple and bracing truth: no vocation, no call, no merit comes from us. Everything is a gift.
He cited Saint Augustine, that doctor of grace whom we so love, to emphasize that without God's first love, we cannot even love. This is the theology of gratuity, far from all modern psychologism or activism. We are first nourished by God like a child at its mother's breast, he said, echoing the very concrete imagery of Scripture and the Fathers.
But Grace Calls for a Free Response: The Obedience of Faith
He could have stopped there, but he did not. Leo XIV does not infantilize us; he does not peddle an "automatic" grace. He reminds us that, in Paul, this divine grace met with a response: the obedience of faith. A free, even difficult, adherence. On the road to Damascus, Christ did not destroy Saul's freedom; He called it to conversion. And Paul struggled. He had to confront interior battles, resistances, and pains. Faith is not an enchantment. It is not a sensory experience or a passing emotion; it is a daily battle.
Here, Leo XIV insists on a fundamental point, sometimes set aside in the Church: salvation is a mystery of grace AND faith. God draws us, but we must respond. This is neither Pelagianism nor fideism. It is sound Catholic doctrine.
Charity as the Fruit of This Encounter
But conversion does not stop at faith. It manifests in love: that love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, which drives us to give of ourselves, to forget ourselves. Paul became "all things to all people," and Leo XIV sees in this the very heart of the Christian mission. The Christian does not live for himself. He runs, he proclaims, he loves. And this love is not sentimental: it is active, concrete, sacrificial. It leads to martyrdom.
It is in this context that the Pope briefly evoked the Benedictines, guardians of the basilica for centuries, and their fraternal charity, so central to the Rule of Saint Benedict. Fidelity, community life, hospitality: essential values, bulwarks against the individualism of our age.
The homily concluded with a beautiful echo of the words of Pope Benedict XVI, who told the young:
"God loves us. This is the great truth of our life."
It is simple, direct, true. And this, for Leo XIV, is the root of all mission, including his own: to know oneself loved by God, in order to love in return.
And here, one senses the man of prayer. One senses he who is not there to play a media role, nor to craft an image, but to respond to a call, like Paul, in the weakness of the flesh but the strength of faith.