Don’t worry, I’m not bringing back the old “Caught My Eye” feature. You have to listen to The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM for that. Just some links to early commentary and summations on/of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical:

a great and energizing hope born of Christian faith. That faith in turn underwrites a striking confidence in the human capacity to do better than we’re doing at present. 

a great and energizing hope born of Christian faith. That faith in turn underwrites a striking confidence in the human capacity to do better than we’re doing at present. 

What we often experience as a limit — “incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability” — is in fact where we learn what truly ennobles our humanity: “compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God.” Families that have come closer through the presence of a child with Down syndrome, psychiatrists who have helped wounded souls back to mental health, and those who offer exquisite personal care to the elderly weakened by dementia will all recognize the countercultural but humanizing truth Leo teaches here.   Arguments in the weeks and months ahead will likely center on the pope’s proposals for guiding and regulating the hypersonic evolution of AI. Several critical points that form the intellectual and spiritual scaffolding on which Magnifica Humanitas is built shouldn’t get lost in the policy debate, however. Like the point that human dignity is inalienable and inherent, not a benefice bestowed by the state or ascribed by socioeconomic status. And the point that, however confused our human condition, “creation bears the imprint of an original goodness” that we are to “bring to fulfillment.”........

© National Review