Pope Leo XIV on May 20 visited St. Paul Outside the Walls Basilica, one of the papal basilicas located outside Rome, to pray at the tomb of the “apostle to the Gentiles.”
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Upon his arrival, the Holy Father was welcomed by basilca abbot Father Donato Ogliari, OSB, and the archpriest of the basilica, Cardinal James Michael Harvey.
Accompanied by Benedictine monks, custodians of the church built over the tomb of St. Paul the Apostle, Pope Leo XIV entered the basilica through the Holy Door amid the chants of the Sistine Chapel choir and the Benedictine community.
He then descended to the altar of confession to venerate the tomb of St. Paul, kneeling in silence. After returning to the apse of the church, a passage from St. Paul the Apostle’s Letter to the Romans was read.
In his homily, delivered in Italian, the Holy Father emphasized that the reading revolves around three themes — “grace, faith, and justification” — and entrusted the beginning of his pontificate to the intercession of the apostle to the Gentiles.
Leo XIV reminded the nearly 2,000 faithful gathered in the basilica that St. Paul claimed to have received “from God the grace of his vocation.”
“He acknowledges, in other words, that his encounter with Christ and his own ministry were the fruit of God’s prior love, which called him to a new life while he was still far from the Gospel and persecuting the Church,” he explained.
He also quoted the convert St. Augustine, the pope’s spiritual father, “who spoke of the same experience.”
In this context, he emphasized that “at the root of every vocation, God is present, in his mercy and his goodness, as generous as that of a mother who nourishes her child with her own body for as long as the child is unable to feed itself.”
Recalling how St. Paul spoke of the “obedience of faith,” he pointed out, however, that on the road to Damascus, the Lord “did not take away his freedom but gave him the opportunity to make a decision, to choose an obedience that would prove costly and entail interior and exterior struggles, which Paul proved willing to face.”
The pontiff thus pointed out that “salvation does not come about by magic but by a mysterious interplay of grace and faith, of God’s prevenient love and of our trusting and free acceptance.”
In this regard, he invited the faithful to “ask him to enable us to respond in the same way to his grace and to become, ourselves, witnesses of the love ‘poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’”
“Let us ask the Lord for the grace to cultivate and spread his charity,” he continued, “and to become true neighbors to one another. Let us compete in showing the love that, following his encounter with Christ, drove the former persecutor to become ‘all things to all people’ even to the point of martyrdom.”
He further emphasized that “the weakness of the flesh will show the power of faith in God that brings justification.”
From this basilica, entrusted to the care of the Benedictine community, Pope Leo XIV also recalled St. Benedict, who proposed “love as the source and driving force of the preaching of the Gospel,” noting his insistent exhortations “to fraternal charity.”
The pontiff did not want to end his homily without recalling Pope Benedict XVI and his words at World Youth Day in Madrid in 2011: “‘Dear friends,’” he said, “‘God loves us. This is the great truth of our life; it is what makes everything else meaningful.” Indeed, “our life originates as part of a loving plan of God,” and faith leads us to “open our hearts to this mystery of love and to live as men and women conscious of being loved by God.’”
“Here we see, in all its simplicity and uniqueness, the basis of every mission, including my own mission as the successor of Peter and the heir to Paul’s apostolic zeal. May the Lord grant me the grace to respond faithfully to his call,” Leo XIV concluded.
At the end of his homily, the Holy Father knelt again before the altar, located above the apostle’s tomb. Later, the Lord’s Prayer and the Regina Caeli were sung in Latin.
Pope Leo XIV left the basilica again in procession, preceded by Benedictine monks, to the applause of the faithful.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
