2026

VaticanNews portal reports (May 7, 2026) that Pope Leo XIV, in a series of fourteen catecheses delivered between January 7 and May 6, 2026, presented the Second Vatican Council as the Church’s enduring “North Star,” urging Catholics to rediscover its documents as a living guide for proclaiming Christ, defending human dignity, promoting justice and peace, and renewing the Church in fidelity to the Gospel. The Pope emphasized the need to know the Council “not through hearsay or through the interpretations that have been offered of it, but by rereading its documents and reflecting on their content,” framing this as an opportunity to “understand the changes and challenges of the modern age” and to “help build a more just and fraternal society,” while remaining with “open arms” towards humanity, its hopes and its anxieties. Leo XIV devoted five catecheses to *Dei Verbum* on divine revelation, describing it as “one of the most beautiful and important documents of the Council,” and eight to *Lumen gentium* on the Church, presenting the Church as an “effective sign of unity and reconciliation among peoples” and a “sanctifying presence in the midst of a humanity still fractured” by divisions and conflict. He warned against both “fundamentalist” readings of Scripture and reducing it to “merely human teaching,” stressed the role of the laity as “witnesses to justice and peace” extending their apostolate “into the world,” and described holiness as “the calling of all Christians through charity.” The entire enterprise constitutes not a renewal of the faith but a systematic consecration of the very errors that the pre-conciliar Magisterium had identified and condemned as the synthesis of all heresies: Modernism.