We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

The first pope named Leo (440-461), whose feast day is celebrated Nov. 10, combined intense spirituality with pragmatic diplomacy.

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ACI Prensa Staff, Nov 7, 2025 / 16:11 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Friday warned about new addictions of recent times such as compulsive gambling, betting, and pornography as consequences of excessive internet use.

The Holy Father issued his warning in a video message addressed to participants in the seventh National Conference on Addictions, organized in Rome by Italy’s Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

In his Nov. 7 message, the pontiff emphasized that in recent times, in addition to addictions such as drugs and alcohol — which continue to be the most prevalent — “new forms have emerged, since the growing use of the internet, computers, and smartphones is associated not only with clear benefits but also an excessive use that often leads to addictions with negative consequences for health.”

These addictions, the pope explained, are related “to compulsive gambling and betting, pornography, and almost constant presence on digital platforms. The object of addiction becomes an obsession, conditioning behavior and daily life.”

He emphasized that these phenomena are “a symptom of the mental or inner distress of the individual and a social decline in positive values and references, particularly in teenagers and young people.”

In this context, he stressed that this time of youth “is a time of trials and questions, of the search for meaning in life,” sometimes marked by drug use, the pursuit of easy money through slot machines, or internet addiction, which demonstrates “that we live in a world without hope, where there is a lack of vigorous human and spiritual proposals.”

Consequently, he lamented that many young people “think that all forms of behavior are equal, as they are unable to distinguish good from evil and do not have a sense of moral limits.”

For this reason, the Holy Father urged everyone to value and encourage “the efforts of parents and various educational agencies, such as schools, parishes, and oratories, aimed at inspiring spiritual and moral values in the younger generation so that they behave responsibly.”

Furthermore, he emphasized that young people “need to form their consciences, develop their inner lives, and establish positive relationships with their peers and constructive dialogue with adults in order to become free and responsible architects of their own lives.”

Pope Leo made a powerful appeal to institutions, the Church, and all of society “to perceive among these young people a cry for help and a deep thirst for life, to offer an attentive and supportive presence that invites them to make an intellectual and moral effort, and helps them to forge their will.”

He thus called for a commitment to prevention efforts “that translates into action by the community as a whole.” He also emphasized the urgency of “boosting the self-esteem of the younger generation in order to combat the sense of insecurity and emotional instability fostered both by social pressures and by the very nature of adolescence.”

Finally, he encouraged the formulation of “practical proposals aimed at promoting a culture of solidarity and subsidiarity; a culture that opposes selfishness and utilitarian and economic logic but which reaches out to others, listening to them, on a journey of encounter and relationship with our neighbors, especially when they are most vulnerable and fragile.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 7, 2025 / 15:41 pm (CNA).

An underground Chinese Catholic bishop from the Diocese of Zhengding has died at 90 years old. 

Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo, a Catholic bishop in China renowned for his unwavering adherence to the Church despite decades of persecution at the hands of the Chinese government, passed away on Oct. 29.

A member of the underground Church, unsanctioned by the Chinese government, Zhiguo was bishop of the Zhengnding Diocese in the Hebei Province. He was known for having a missionary spirit, promoting priestly training, caring for children with disabilities, and maintaining communion with Rome. 

Born on May 1, 1935, in Wuqiu Village, Jinzhou City, Zhiguo was ordained a priest in 1980 by Bishop Fan Xueyan of Baoding, who later consecrated him as bishop, according to Vatican News’ Chinese-language site.

“The big problems started when I was a seminarian,” he told the Italian news outlet La Stampa in 2016. “From 1963 to 1978 I worked as a forced laborer in remote, cold and hostile areas.”

In the same interview, he said he had “lost count” of how many times he had been arrested. Latest UCA reports say his last arrest took place in August 2020. 

“My life,” Zhiguo said when asked about his experience as a pastor in China, “consists of speaking about Jesus. I have nothing else to say or do. My whole life, every single day, is dedicated to telling others about Jesus. Everyone.” 

Blessed Juan de Palafox y Mendoza and Our Lady of Guadalupe. / Credit: Public domain

ACI Prensa Staff, Nov 7, 2025 / 15:11 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV praised the missionary work of the Church in Mexico throughout history, inspired by the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the example of Blessed Juan de Palafox y Mendoza.

In a message addressed to the participants of the 17th National Missionary Congress of Mexico, being held in Puebla Nov. 7–9, the Holy Father noted that the greatest privilege and duty of missionaries is “to bring Christ to the heart of every person.”

Taking a closer look at missionary work, the pope offered the parable of the yeast from the Gospel of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened” (Mt 13:33).

In light of this verse, the pope explained that the “leaven of the Gospel” arrived in Mexico in the hands of a few missionaries: “These were the hands of the Church, which began to knead the leaven they carried with them — the deposit of faith — with the new flour of a continent that did not yet know the name of Christ.”

The Holy Father noted that the Gospel “did not erase what it found but transformed it,” until it “took root in their hearts and blossomed into works of unique holiness and beauty.”

Legacy of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Blessed Juan de Palafox y Mendoza

The pope referred to the message of the Virgin Mary on Tepeyac Hill as “a sign of perfect inculturation” that God bestowed upon the Church, and noted that the message of Guadalupe provided “missionary momentum” for the first evangelizers, who “faithfully took up the task of doing what Christ commanded.”

He also highlighted the figure of Blessed Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, whom he described as a “pastor and missionary who understood his ministry as service and leaven.”

The Holy Father recalled his visit to Puebla as prior general of the Order of St. Augustine, where, he stated, the figure of Blessed Juan “remained alive in the memory of the people of Puebla; his [spiritual] fatherhood had left such a profound mark that it is still felt today in the simple faith of the faithful.”

Palafox served as bishop of Puebla in the mid-1600s. 

For the pontiff, the example of the bishop challenges pastors today, “for it teaches that to govern is to serve, that to provide serious formation is to evangelize, and that all authority, when exercised according to the criteria of Christ, becomes a source of communion and hope.”

Furthermore, as the pope pointed out, in his life and writings Palafox “shows that the true missionary does not dominate but loves; does not impose but serves; and does not exploit faith for personal gain.”

Looking at the present, he lamented that “social divisions, the challenges of new technologies, and sincere desires for peace continue to be ground together like new flours that risk being fermented with bad yeast.”

Therefore, he emphasized that today’s missionaries are called to be “the hands of the Church that place the leaven of the risen Lord in the dough of history, so that hope may be fermented anew.”

“We must be willing to put our hands into the dough of the world! It is not enough to talk about the flour without getting our hands messed up; we must touch it,” he emphasized.

He added: “This is how the kingdom will grow — not by force or numbers but by the patience of those who, with faith and love, continue kneading alongside God.”

At the end of his message, the pope noted that the Catholic Church in Mexico “strives to live this call of Christ fully” and thus thanked the missionaries for their dedication.

“May the Lord Jesus make all your initiatives fruitful and may Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Star of Evangelization, always accompany you with her motherly tenderness, showing you the way that leads to God,” he prayed.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

Pope Leo XIV greets pilgrims during his general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025 / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA

Vatican City, Nov 7, 2025 / 14:41 pm (CNA).

The story of a mother whose son committed suicide after interacting with a chatbot moved participants at an AI conference in Rome on Friday, underscoring what Pope Leo XIV described earlier in the day as Catholics’ moral and spiritual responsibility for the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

An MIT researcher nearly broke down in tears as he recounted the experience of the woman, Megan Garcia, who herself took part in the conference and spoke there to experts in robotics and AI.

“I apologize for being so emotional because it is so emotional,” said Jose J. Pacheco, co-director of the MIT Advanced Manufacturing and Design Program, speaking at the Builders AI Forum at the Pontifical Gregorian University on Nov. 7. He said Garcia's story illustrated “how urgent this conversation needs to be, how urgent this conversation is, and how much responsibility we have.”

In a message to the conference, which was read aloud to participants on Friday morning, Leo said the development of AI “cannot be confined to research labs or investment portfolios. It must be a profoundly ecclesial endeavor.”

He urged all AI creators to “cultivate moral discernment” and put technology at the service of every human person.

AI, the pope wrote, “carries an ethical and spiritual weight” because “every design choice expresses a vision of humanity.” He called on builders of AI “to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”

“Whether designing algorithms for Catholic education, tools for compassionate health care, or creative platforms that tell the Christian story with truth and beauty, each participant contributes to a shared mission: to place technology at the service of evangelization and the integral development of every person,” Leo XIV said.

The two-day Builders AI Forum brought together Catholic ethicists, entrepreneurs, educators, technology experts, and health care professionals from more than 160 organizations across the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Vatican. Hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University and sponsored by Longbeard, the company behind the Catholic chatbot Magisterium AI, the event aimed to form an interdisciplinary community to guide AI innovation through the lens of Catholic social teaching.

In small working groups, participants discussed AI’s impact on education, health care, and business. Educators debated how much children should interact with chatbots, while health care experts questioned what the “essential role of a human” in medicine could be in an increasingly automated system.

On the sidelines of the conference, young Catholic entrepreneurs pitched new AI tools and applications to potential investors, and professors exchanged ideas with practitioners over cappuccinos. Despite differences in opinion, participants broadly agreed that Catholics — with their intellectual and ethical tradition and focus on human dignity — must help shape AI’s future.

Josh Thomason, CEO of TrekAI, an Atlanta-based Catholic tutoring startup, said he attended to “come together with like-minded believers to think together about where we are today and how we iterate towards what that future is.” He added that “it is critical that people of faith are ultimately working in this space to shape it.”

John Johnson, CEO of Patmos Hosting and the Albertus Magnus Institute in California, urged participants to offer a “human alternative” to the commodification of people by technology.

“Every tech company that invented this technology … has the same exact product and that’s you, and that’s me,” Johnson said. “The Church … is called to stand up and very aggressively, even triumphantly, pronounce … the transcendent alternative to the commodification of the human person.”

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope and a former mathematics major, has made ethical technology one of the key priorities of his papacy. He said he chose his papal name in part to honor Pope Leo XIII, who addressed the challenges of the industrial revolution in his encyclical Rerum Novarum.

“In our own day,” Leo said shortly after his election in May, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

Leo XIV praised the Builders AI Forum for fostering “dialogue between faith and reason renewed in the digital epoch,” saying that “intelligence — whether artificial or human — finds its fullest meaning in love, freedom, and relationship with God.”

President Joe Biden speaks during an interfaith prayer service at the Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis, King of France, in New Orleans on Jan. 6, 2025. / Credit: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 7, 2025 / 14:11 pm (CNA).

A report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) compiled regulatory actions under former President Joe Biden that the researchers argue show systematic anti-Christian bias from the prior administration.

The Nov. 3 report was released in response to President Donald Trump’s Feb. 6 executive order to eradicate anti-Christian bias and protect religious liberty through changes to federal policies and regulations.

According to the report, the Biden administration disregarded religious liberty as a means to enforce its “radical pro-abortion and pro-LGBTQI+ policies.” It states that religious liberty was ignored “when it came to those policy priorities,” which affected public and private employees, businesses, religious organizations, students, and those seeking federal partnerships.

The report lists three key ways in which this was carried out: policies at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that attacked health-care-related rights of conscience, policies at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that jeopardized religious liberty, and a broader failure to respect religious liberty through the rulemaking process.

Anti-Christian policies and practices

Under Biden, the report said HHS dismantled the enforcement of conscience protections for health care workers despite safeguards in federal law. It says former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra got rid of most mentions of conscience and religious freedom protections and eliminated the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.

Biden’s HHS website listed four actions regarding conscience protections as of 2024, and two of those were to halt enforcement measures taken under Trump, the report said. The two other measures sought to protect health care workers who participated in abortions. 

HHS also sought to enforce the Affordable Care Act’s ban on “sex” discrimination to include a ban on discriminating against a person based on “gender identity” or having an abortion. HHS later conceded it would hear religious liberty objections on a “case-by-case basis” to permit employees to bring cases against religious employers, according to the report.

The report said HHS used the same “case-by-case” standard for other anti-discrimination rules, including in the administration of grants. 

At EEOC, the administration sought to limit religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, the report notes. One example listed was enforcement of the Protecting Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, in which the administration sought to force employers, including religious organizations, to offer accommodations for women to procure abortions. This prompted a lawsuit from the U.S. Catholic bishops and other groups, which led to multiple courts halting enforcement. 

The report notes that the EEOC also pushed transgender pronoun and bathroom mandates on businesses and often argued against religious liberty exemption requests in court proceedings.

The authors of the report encouraged the Trump administration to rewrite any regulations that jeopardize religious liberty. It also suggested that Congress pass laws to better protect religious liberty, which could prevent future administrations from disregarding those protections.

EPPC President Ryan Anderson serves on the Religious Liberty Commission, which Trump created earlier this year to combat discrimination against religious people and organizations.

Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025, presents a liturgical curve ball with the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica. Why do we honor one specific building in Rome? In this weekend's homily reflection, Archbishop Weisenburger suggests that honoring our sacred spaces points us toward something much greater: the living Church we form together in Christ.

Photo of the latest federal passport form with no “X” option and the updated sex identification section. / Credit: U.S. Department of State

CNA Staff, Nov 7, 2025 / 11:56 am (CNA).

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Thursday that the Trump administration could require passports to display an applicant’s biological sex, granting the White House a victory in its efforts to roll back transgender ideology in federal policy.

The court said in an unsigned Nov. 6 order that requiring biological sex on a passport “no more offends equal protection principles than displaying [a] country of birth.”

In either case, “the government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment,” the court said.

The White House is “likely to succeed” in its effort to defend the law, the high court said in the order.

The decision overturns a lower court order that paused the policy while the lawsuit in question plays out in court. The suit was brought by a woman who identifies as a man and who challenged the rule on 14th Amendment grounds.

In a dissent, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan referred to the passport policy as “questionably legal” and argued that individuals who identify as the opposite sex will suffer “concrete injury” if required to display their sex on their passport.

Citing the government’s decades-old policy allowing for opposite-sex identification on passports, the justices argued that Americans who want to be identified as the opposite sex would experience “significant anxiety and fear for their safety” if required to correctly identify the biological marker on their passports. 

In a post on X on Nov. 6, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the order was the administration’s “24th victory” at the Supreme Court so far. 

“Today’s stay allows the government to require citizens to list their biological sex on their passport,” Bondi wrote. “In other words: There are two sexes, and our attorneys will continue fighting for that simple truth.”

The policy comes after several months of effort by the Trump administration to reverse transgender-related rules and policies at the federal level. 

In January President Donald Trump signed an executive order removing gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms from governmental agencies. That order also affirmed that the word “woman” means “adult human female.” 

That same order required government identification like passports and personnel records to reflect biological reality and “not self-assessed gender identity.” 

The White House has also investigated hospitals for performing irreversible and experimental transgender procedures on children. Multiple U.S. children’s hospitals have ended their child gender programs in response to federal pressure. 

Church leaders, including bishops around the world, have spoken out against transgenderism and gender ideology. In April 2024, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith said in its declaration Dignitas Infinita that gender ideology “intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference.”

The Holy See said at the time that “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected” and that “only by acknowledging and accepting this difference in reciprocity can each person fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.”