Vatican City, July 21, 2025 – this week’s Vaticano updates. The most important news from the Holy Father and the Vatican.
The Holy Family Church in Gaza was struck by a raid on July 17, resulting in three people dead and several injured, including the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli. In a telegram, Pope Leo XIV expressed his sorrow and called for an immediate ceasefire. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, also commented on this and explained in the official media channel of the Vatican that an Israeli tank hit the church, but that the army had spoken of a mistake.
Greek Orthodox, Byzantine Catholic, and Latin Catholic pilgrims from the United States met Pope Leo XIV in Castel Gandolfo, led by Cardinal Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, and Greek Orthodox Archbishop Elpidophoros of America. The ecumenical pilgrimage visited Rome, Constantinople, and Nicaea. A joint Orthodox-Catholic pilgrimage was one of the fruits of the ecumenical movement aimed at restoring full unity among all Christ’s disciples, Pope Leo XIV told the participants. He also remarked that this pilgrimage returns to the sources with Rome as a place where Saints Peter and Paul were martyred, Constantinople—today’s Istanbul in Turkey—which is associated with St. Andrew, and Nicaea, also in Turkey, the site of the first ecumenical council 1,700 years ago this year.
Developed nations should assist poorer countries with debt relief and allow them to grow their economies. The Holy See urged the international community on July 16 to step up their efforts in this regard. Addressing two UN panels on the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations in New York, affirmed the moral and political responsibility to help all nations achieve sustainable development. Debt relief is also traditionally associated with the Holy Year, and Pope Leo the 14th held that the Jubilee, which is being celebrated this year by the Catholic Church, and I quote, “asks of us the restitution and redistribution of unjustly accumulated wealth as the way to personal and civil reconciliation.”
“It is always possible to encounter one another even in time of divisions, bombs, and wars,” Pope Leo said in a video message for the participants of an Italian charity soccer match on July 15. The event raised funds for children from war-torn countries which receive free treatment at the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù Hospital. The Holy Father also commented on the uniting aspect of sports, saying that it has this great thing about it—that it transforms confrontation into encounter, division into inclusion, loneliness into community.
Speaking to EWTN News, Dott. Tiziano Onesti, the President of Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital, said that the Pope’s hospital is always on the front lines of supporting children in need.
At the end of July, the Jubilee of Youth will welcome hundreds of thousands of young people from around the world, and the city of Rome—which is also the Diocese of the Holy Father—is readying itself to receive close to a million youths. Speaking to EWTN News, one of the main organizers, Father Alfredo Tedesco, said that he’s convinced that young people will never experience this in their lives again. The Italian priest was 18 when he participated in the Jubilee of 2000 with St. John Paul II. And this time as well, the Holy Father will first receive the young people at St. Peter’s Square in the city center and then celebrate a vigil and the Holy Mass on the outskirts of Rome in Tor Vergata.
