Leo & Liturgy

A new study group takes up questions raised by the Synod on Synodality.

Rita Ferrone

January 22, 2026

Synodality

Please email comments to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass as part of the Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies in St. Peter’s Basilica, October 2025 (CNS photo/Vatican Media).

There has been so much carrying on in American media about the Latin Mass, you’d think the only important liturgical question in Rome is whether and how much Pope Leo XIV will roll back Pope Francis’s restrictions on use of the Tridentine rite. But if there are some tea leaves to read, the establishment of a new study group on liturgy for the Synod implementation process would suggest that Leo has a different—and much more interesting—agenda.

Find voices of hope — even when you're doomscrolling

 

Find voices of hope — even when you're doomscrolling

Michael J. O'Loughlin  ncr

Is Europe witnessing a young Christian 'quiet revival'? The data is contested

Is Europe witnessing a young Christian 'quiet revival'? The data is contested

News

• ncr

  Jonathan Luxmoore

 

Pope warns against 'new arms race' as last U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty nears expiration

 

February 4, 2026

Pope warns against 'new arms race' as last U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty nears expiration

Justin McLellan  ncr

Leo XIV’s remarks to Doctrine office give subtle signals

 

Leo XIV’s remarks to Doctrine office give subtle signals

VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Crux [Denver CO]

February 1, 2026

By Christopher R. Altieri

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Pope Leo XIV addressed the participants in the plenary session of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on Thursday of last week, and his remarks for the occasion reward careful attention.

Gently and without fanfare, without spectacle, in terms humane and genuinely solicitous of the department’s work, Leo set not so much a new agenda as a new – old – course for the office, after a two-year adventure inaugurated when Francis named Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández to lead the dicastery.

“I am well aware of the valuable service you perform,” Leo said, “with the aim – as the Constitution Praedicate Evangelium states – to ‘help the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world by promoting and safeguarding the integrity of Catholic teaching on faith and morals … by drawing upon the deposit of faith and seeking an ever deeper understanding of it in the…

With assisted suicide law, Illinois surrenders to culture of death

 

• ncr

  Enzo Del Brocco

With assisted suicide law, Illinois surrenders to culture of death

Traditionalist Catholic society announces bishop consecrations in defiance of Rome

 

Vatican

Traditionalist Catholic society announces bishop consecrations in defiance of Rome

Justin McLellan  ncr

 

Another Requiem in Minneapolis

Words still matter here in image-besotted Minnesota.

Patricia Hampl

January 31, 2026

A person holds a U.S. flag during clashes between federal agents and community members at the scene of a fatal shooting involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis (OSV News photo/Seth Herald, Reuters)

The personal misery of a police state is hard for language to capture. The Russians are better at it than we can pretend to be during this ragged Minnesota winter of our ICE occupation. Well, their experience is so much longer, deeper. Czarist prisons, the Soviet Terror. Their decades, even centuries; our recent months. We do share a relentless climate, the biting winters of Moscow and the steppe, our brutal winds sweeping across the plains to the old northern river towns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Maybe that’s why Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” comes to mind just now, more resonant and exact than any American voice I can think of. Especially her prose-like preface about the worst Stalinist times of the 1930s: