We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

Vatican City, Nov 12, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV reflected Wednesday on the world’s need for fraternity — a gift from Christ that frees us from selfishness and division.

Fraternity “is without doubt one of the great challenges for contemporary humanity, as Pope Francis saw clearly,” the pope said during his general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Nov. 12.

“The fraternity given by Christ, who died and rose again, frees us from the negative logic of selfishness, division, and arrogance,” he added.

Continuing his meditations on Christ’s death and resurrection, Leo said “to believe in the death and resurrection of Christ and to live paschal spirituality imbues life with hope and encourages us to invest in goodness.”

He observed that fraternity “cannot be taken for granted, it is not immediate. Many conflicts, many wars all over the world, social tensions and feelings of hatred would seem to prove the opposite.”

Fraternity “is not a beautiful but impossible dream; it is not the desire of a deluded few,” he emphasized, inviting the faithful “to go to the source, and above all to draw light and strength from him who alone frees us from the poison of enmity.”

The importance of relationships

The pope reflected that “fraternity stems from something deeply human. We are capable of relationship and, if we want, we are able to build authentic bonds between us. Without relationships, which support and enrich us from the very beginning of our life, we would not be able to survive, grow, or learn. They are manifold, varied in form and depth. But it is certain that our humanity is best fulfilled when we exist and live together, when we succeed in experiencing authentic, not formal, bonds with the people around us.”

He warned that “if we turn in on ourselves, we risk falling ill with loneliness, and even a narcissism that is concerned with others only out of self-interest. The other is then reduced to someone from whom we can take, without ever being truly willing to give, to offer ourselves.”

Recalling that “disagreement, division, and sometimes hatred can devastate even relationships between relatives, not only between strangers,” the pope cited St. Francis of Assisi’s greeting of “omnes fratres,” (“all brothers”) — “the inclusive way in which the saint placed all human beings on the same level, precisely because he recognized them in their common destiny of dignity, dialogue, welcome, and salvation.”

Leo noted that Pope Francis had reproposed this approach in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, emphasizing that the word “tutti” — Italian for “everyone” — “expresses an essential feature of Christianity, which ever since the beginning has been the proclamation of the good news destined for the salvation of all, never in an exclusive or private form.”

He explained that “this fraternity is based on Jesus’ commandment, which is new insofar as he accomplished it himself, the superabundant fulfillment of the will of the Father: Thanks to him, who loved us and gave himself for us, we can in turn love one another and give our lives for others, as children of the one Father and true brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.”

They weep and rejoice together

“Brothers and sisters support each other in hardship, they do not turn their back on those who are in need, and they weep and rejoice together in the active pursuit of unity, trust, and mutual reliance,” the pope said. “The dynamic is that which Jesus himself gives to us: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (cf. John 15:12).”

He concluded his general audience by reminding the faithful that “the fraternity given by Christ, who died and rose again, frees us from the negative logic of selfishness, division, and arrogance, and restores to us our original vocation, in the name of a love and a hope that are renewed every day. The Risen One has shown us the way to journey with him, to feel and to be ‘brothers and sisters all.’”

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

ACI Prensa Staff, Nov 12, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday celebrated Mass at a Benedictine monastery in Rome, where he urged the monks to confront modern challenges with prayer, study, and personal holiness.

Sant’Anselmo Church, located on the Aventine Hill, was consecrated on Nov. 11, 1900. It is part of a residential college and offices of the Benedictine Confederation, the governing body of the Order of St. Benedict. St. Anselm was a Benedictine monk and doctor of the Church.

Upon his arrival at Sant’Anselmo Church, Leo was welcomed by the abbot primate of the Benedictines, Jeremias Schröder, who symbolically handed over the keys of the church to the pope.

The Holy Father recalled that the church was erected at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, when Pope Leo XIII “was convinced that your ancient order could be of great help to the good of all God’s people at a time full of challenges.”

“The monastery,” he continued, “has increasingly come to be seen as a place of growth, peace, hospitality, and unity, even during the darkest periods of history.”

Turning to the present day, Leo reflected on the challenges of the modern world, which “provoke and question us, raising issues never before encountered.”

He addressed the Benedictine monks directly, inviting them to respond to the demands of their vocation by “placing Christ at the center of our existence and our mission — beginning from that act of faith that leads us to recognize in him the Savior, and translating it into prayer, study, and the commitment of a holy life.”

He urged the monks of the Aventine to become “a beating heart within the great body of the Benedictine world — with the church at its center, according to the teachings of St. Benedict.”

“In the industrious hive of Sant’Anselmo,” he added, “may this be the place from which everything begins and to which everything returns to be verified, confirmed, and deepened before God.”

The pope also reflected on the deeper meaning of the anniversary, saying that “the dedication marks the solemn moment in the history of a sacred building when it is consecrated to be a place of encounter between space and time, between the finite and the infinite, between man and God: an open door toward eternity, where the soul finds an answer to ‘the tension between the circumstances of the moment and the light of time, of the larger horizon … which opens us to the future as a final cause that attracts.’”

He went on to recall the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium, a constitution on the sacred liturgy, which “describes all this in one of its most beautiful pages, when it defines the Church as ‘human and divine, visible yet endowed with invisible realities, zealous in action and dedicated to contemplation, present in the world and yet a pilgrim; … in such a way, however, that what is human in her is ordered and subordinated to the divine, the visible to the invisible, action to contemplation, the present reality to the future city toward which we are journeying.’”

“This,” the pope said, “is the experience of our lives and of the lives of all men and women of this world — searching for that ultimate and fundamental answer that ‘neither flesh nor blood’ can reveal, but only the Father who is in heaven; ultimately, a need for Jesus, ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”

At the end of his homily, the Holy Father recalled that Jesus “is the one we are called to seek, and to him we are called to bring all those we meet — grateful for the gifts he has bestowed upon us, and above all for the love with which he has gone before us.”

“Then this temple,” Leo XIV concluded, “will increasingly become a place of joy, where we experience the beauty of sharing with others what we have freely received.”

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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ACI Prensa Staff, Nov 12, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Ana Lazcano, director of the University Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Francisco de Vitoria University in Spain, warned that AI is not an all-powerful deity and it is necessary to “lay the foundations of critical thinking” about the technology.

In a conversation with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Lazcano explained that the recently created institute she directs seeks to provide a unified vision of AI: “It is a discipline that has arrived like a tsunami, an interdisciplinary science that is sweeping us all away in every area, and we need a unified approach; we need to build strength together.”

For Lazcano, who also directs the university’s master’s programs in business analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and generative AI for business, this unified vision is “very necessary, because many ethical questions are also involved. How are we using AI? What is the objective? To replace us, to complement us? The more aligned the vision is with the university’s mission, the greater the benefit we will be able to obtain.”

The new University Institute of Artificial Intelligence is integrated into the university both organizationally and through the multidisciplinary nature of its collaborators: philosophers, anthropologists, educators, engineers, psychologists, and others.

“There are representatives from all faculties and departments of the university, allowing each to have their perspective from their field, share it, and find those common points,” Lazcano explained.

The proposed approach to AI from a specifically Catholic perspective, she affirmed, is the one of Pope Leo XIV: “Not to be afraid of it, to understand it, to approach it with great caution.”

This caution refers to the fact that “we cannot attribute qualities and properties to it that it does not possess: Artificial intelligence is not all-powerful. If we put this technology in its proper place — and what we are doing is prioritizing human knowledge, human wisdom, and above all, what makes us different from it — that is when we can make the most of it.”

“The moment we treat artificial intelligence as a deity, we are mistaken; it is far from that, it is a complement,” she emphasized.

Contribution to the common good

The new institute aims to base its activities on four pillars: training, research, technology transfer and application, and dissemination in order to contribute to the common good.

Lazcano shared that the institute hopes to provide society with “well-trained and prepared students,” not only in technical aspects, but above all, “for the ethical challenges posed by” AI as well as the knowledge generated through research and its practical application.

Regarding dissemination, Lazcano pointed out that “it is necessary to lay the foundations for critical thinking. There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, and unfortunately, because there are a lot of voices, there is a lot of noise. We want what we generate to truly contribute; to be quality content that is useful to people.”

Impact on the university world

Artificial intelligence has also impacted the university sphere, Lazcano said, posing a significant challenge to “how we teach, learn, and assess.” 

She said the university should provide technology training and services to professors, students, and researchers because “when you know the tools at your disposal, you are able to apply them more effectively.”

However, “there is resistance to change,” she acknowledged, so the school hopes to implement “a technological support model in which we explain that this is a small but significant revolution; that we have to ride the wave and, above all, take advantage of its capabilities, rather than fearing it or having a negative view.”

One of the biggest challenges is that AI “is opening a spectacular technological gap between teachers and students” in which students are more advanced. “Written work no longer makes much sense. I can no longer tell if a student has done a piece of work or not,” pointed out the expert, who, nevertheless, has a hopeful outlook on the matter.

“I like to think that this is bringing us back to an original concept of university, to debate, to conversation; to putting the student at the center and supporting him in that learning process,” she said. “It’s going to completely change the rules of education, but I think for the better. Once we’ve stabilized a bit, we’ll be able to return to those fundamental subjects and make critical thinking fashionable again, rather than artificial intelligence.”

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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