Gaudium et spes on Leo XIV's programme: the world to convert, not to court

Leo XIV opened, at the general audience of 2 September 2026, in Saint Peter's Square and before some twenty thousand faithful, a new cycle of catecheses devoted to Gaudium et spes, the pastoral constitution promulgated on 7 December 1965 by the Second Vatican Council on the relation of the Church to the world of this age. Since January, the pope has thus been working through the texts of the Council: the document on Scripture, then the one on the liturgy, and now this. He asked the faithful to "rediscover the beauty and the importance" of Vatican II, not "by hearsay" but by re-reading its documents; taking up John XXIII's opening address of 11 October 1962, he set aside the "prophets of doom."

He ranked, among the "contradictions" of the age, "the illusion that war is an effective way to build peace," and repeated from a 2013 text that "the option for the poor is primarily a theological category before being a cultural, sociological, political or philosophical one." On the eve of the memorial of Saint Gregory the Great, whose body rests in Saint Peter's, he greeted the pilgrims of the new season.

The Church did not wait for 1965

The Church did not wait for 1965 to know what it owes the world. It has taught this without variation: the world that the Gospel names is not a partner with which to come to terms, but a domain to convert. Blessed Pius IX condemned in express terms the idea "that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization" (Syllabus, 1864). Pius XI recalled that the peace of nations is born not of agreement with the age, but of the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Quas primas, 1925). And Saint Pius X had named in advance the device that presents novelty as a return to the sources: modernism, which he called the "synthesis of all heresies" (Pascendi, 1907).

The measure

To rediscover the "beauty" of a council by re-reading its texts presupposes that those texts say what the Church has always said; and that is precisely what remains in dispute. To set aside the "prophets of doom" is to set aside those who, in 1962, feared the opening to the age; yet the office of the shepherd is not to hope in the world, but to condemn error and to guard the deposit (1 Timothy 6:20).

To erect "the option for the poor" into a "theological category" shifts charity, which is a precept, toward a doctrine, which it is not: the Gospel commands us to love the poor, it does not canonize poverty as a system. As for war, tradition has never made it a builder of peace; but it has distinguished the unjust war, which is a crime, from the just war, ordered to the restoration of an offended order and to that peace which is the tranquillity of order. To confuse the two in a single "illusion" erases a distinction that the catechism held to be necessary.

Sources. Blessed Pius IX, Syllabus (1864), proposition 80, and Quanta cura; Pius XI, Quas primas (1925), on the social reign of Christ the King; Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment; Saint Paul, First Epistle to Timothy VI, 20, in the Douay-Rheims of the Vulgate.