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The Church never stopped calling her blessed. Only modern Christians did.

"Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it has a God who knows the way out of the grave."

URGENT CALL FOR PRAYER! Bishop Rob Mutsaerts was just in a serious car crash on his way home from hearing confessions. He suffered a dislocated hip, fractured pelvis, and broken elbow. His Excellency was one of four courageous bishops who stood with Bishop Schneider at the 2025 CIC and led Catholics around the world via livestream in an Act of Reparation for the August 2025 LGBT pilgrimage into St. Peter's Basilica. Below is a clip from his 2025 CIC address. Please pray for the rapid and full recovery of this faithful shepherd!

On this day in 1873, a Catholic priest arrived at a leper colony in Molokai, Hawaii. He built their homes, dug their graves, and wrote: “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.” Eventually, he died serving the lepers he loved. Today is the feast day of Saint Damien of Molokai. Pray for us!

I believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. 🇻🇦

The most loved image of Pope Leo XIV to date.

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà? The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history... Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl. His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?" Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect. The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature: "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio." "Virgin mother, daughter of your own son." Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator. But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home. And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him... Happy Mother's Day. -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

POV: Pope LeoXIV and his plushie 😍

Last year, 103 men were ordained to the priesthood for the Dominicans, one of the most vibrant religious communities worldwide. Image: opwest

Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress has launched an ATTACK on Pope Leo XIV Jeffress, who was with Donald Trump in the Oval Office three days after the Iran War started, MOCKED the pope by claiming that Trump 'has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches' than the pope

Marshall’s is Catholic. Happy Mother’s day! 🥰

Seminarians from the University of St.Mary of the Lake in Chicago carry a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe during procession through little village April 29.

Young French Catholics are restoring damaged crosses & crucifixes throughout all of France! Young French Catholic volunteers, gathered in the SOS Calvaires association, are restoring damaged crosses and crucifixes throughout France. The movement has recently gained momentum with young volunteers refurbishing wooden crosses — often vandalized or deteriorated by time.

If you pitched this as a screenplay every studio would reject it for being too on-the-nose. A 73-year-old architect walks to confession in 1926 and gets hit by a tram on the Gran Via in Barcelona. He's mistaken for a vagrant because of his worn clothes and left at a pauper's hospital. He dies three days later. His name is Antoni Gaudí. The cathedral he leaves behind is less than a quarter complete. The plans to finish it sit in his workshop as plaster models and detailed drawings. Ten years after his death, in July 1936, FAI anarchists break into that workshop. They smash the plaster models. They burn the archive of drawings and calculations. They pry open Gaudí's tomb. For the next 50 years, architects piece together a destroyed playbook from photographs and broken plaster fragments. The geometry was the real problem. Gaudí designed the church using upside-down hanging-chain models because the math for hyperboloid intersections did not yet exist on paper. He had solved it physically. Computers finally caught up to him in the 1980s. By 2010 the project was 50% complete. By 2015 stone elements that took months to hand-carve were being modelled digitally and machine-cut in days. Now the kicker. The building is funded entirely by people paying admission to see scaffolding. €134.5 million of income in 2025, all private, none of it from the Spanish state or the Vatican. About 4.7 million tourists a year buying €26 tickets to watch a cathedral get built. The unfinished state was the product. On June 10, 2026, exactly 100 years to the day after Gaudí died, the cross goes up on the Tower of Jesus Christ. 144 years from groundbreaking. 172.5 meters tall. The tallest church building in the world, beating Ulm Minster, which took 513 years. When asked why his project was taking so long, Gaudí said one thing: "My client is not in a hurry." Turns out neither was he.

Happy Mother’s Day ❤️ With a special thought for Mildred Prevost, the woman who made the pope.

Israel killed Maryam today in Saksakiyeh, South Lebanon. She was only 2 years old. They killed her mother too — Jana, 24 years old. A baby and her mother. This is what Israel’s bombs do. This is who they kill.

Washington, DC has a large Catholic population, including many converts and Catholics in influential positions. I used to wonder why, despite that presence, there isn’t more visible networking among DC Catholics. A friend of mine, Fady Antoon, started a monthly initiative called Emmaus Hour to bring people together. Last time, it drew nearly 180 professionals, Capitol Hill staffers, lobbyists, and others across different fields. The next one is on May 20th at 7 p.m. It’s a great opportunity, and it would be worth attending and making the most of it.

This was Pope LeoXIV's bedroom when he was serving in Peru.

Please pray for @KeithNester1’s wife. He's a good man and they need a miracle.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admits: "It's not Netanyahu. Any Israeli PM would do the same." Translation: Genocide isn't a personality flaw. It's a national consensus.