From the Editor’s Desk
Editorials that preface issues of TS, written by the editor-in-chief.
From the Editor’s Desk
On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence).1 Signed on May 15—the anniversary of the publication of Rerum Novarum—the encyclical addresses an increasingly urgent challenge for our time: protecting human dignity within a social and economic environment systemically shaped by artificial intelligence (AI).
From the Editor’s Desk
On January 16, 2026, President Trump announced the establishment of the “Board of Peace” composed of nation-state leaders who would work together and facilitate peacekeeping efforts around the world, beginning with a focus on Gaza. The board’s structure has been met with skepticism; its charter identifies Trump as “chairman for life,” and while sixty countries were invited to join, only about twenty—many of them authoritarian states—have formally committed. Among those who declined the invitation was the Holy See. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin explained the refusal by noting the Vatican’s view “that at the international level it should above all be the UN that manages these crisis situations.” His concern is particularly relevant given the president’s musing that the Board of Peace “might” eventually supersede the UN entirely.
From the Editor’s Desk
When I began my tenure as editor-in-chief in January 2021, I considered eliminating the editor’s column, or at least limiting its content to introducing the articles. I believed that, with readers increasingly accessing the journal online, most people would directly target specific articles and would not be “flipping” through the electronic pages, so to speak, to find the editor’s column. However, after exploring a number of past issues, I realized that the column provided a historical record of journal matters and editorial perspectives on world events and, for that reason, merited continuation.
From the Editor’s Desk
As I write this, students have recently returned to Georgetown’s campus and begun classes. The time has been a blur of joyful, energy-filled events—from community cookouts and open-air movies on the lawn to a goat-petting station. Unfortunately, the happy normalcy that radiates campus life is sadly discordant from the larger reality beyond our gates, where thousands of National Guard troops have arrived in the nation’s capital, purportedly to combat crime.
From the Editor’s Desk
As this issue goes to press, just over a month has passed since Robert Francis
Prevost was elected pope, taking the name Leo. While it is certainly too early
to ascertain the precise direction this pontificate will chart for the life of the
church and its engagement with the world, the absence of certainty has done little to
quell the widespread tide of speculation. Indeed, almost immediately following Pope
Leo XIV’s introduction shortly after noon on May 8, 2025 from the iconic balcony
overlooking St. Peter’s Square, ecclesial observers and pundits began meticulously
scrutinizing every facet of his past and present ministry.
From the Editor’s Desk
The journal’s readers are likely aware of the controversy created by Vice President JD Vance’s defense of the Trump administration’s “America First” policy. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity,1 he appealed to the idea of an ordo amoris (introduced by Augustine and developed by Aquinas). Some Catholic voices defended Vance’s interpretation,2 while others criticized it as misguided, particularly in regard to how it ignored the priority that Christianity gives to the urgency and desperation of our neighbors’ needs. As Stephen Pope put it, “No true Catholic ethic relegates mass numbers of distant suffering neighbors to the outer periphery of our moral concern.”3
From the Editor’s Desk
This past December, I had the pleasure of attending a conference in Assisi, “The
Feast of the Mystery of Creation: A Deeper Catholic Exploration.” The theme
of the conference was the same as the earlier Assisi gathering held in March
2024: the possibility of establishing a universal feast on September 1 celebrating
God’s act of creating.1
The December conference, however, had a specifically Catholic
focus, as evidenced in both the arguments made and the identities of the attendees
(e.g., Vatican officials and Catholic scholars).
The discussion continued exploring the arguments identified at the March meeting.
For example, participants noted that the feast is needed in order to address a liturgical
lacuna: God’s act of creating is the one major belief of the Nicene Creed (“maker of
heaven and earth”) without a corresponding feast day celebration. Also, many
observed, it would be quite an ecumenical achievement were the Catholic Church to
establish the feast, given the prominence of September 1 in the Orthodox communion
and the fact that Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian communions have already
begun preparations to include it as part of their own liturgical calendars.
From the Editor’s Desk
Occasionally, I’ll find #PopeFrancis trending on “X” (formerly Twitter). On one such occasion, the cause of the media spike was Francis’s statement that “those who work systematically and with every means possible to repel migrants” are guilty of “grave sin.”1 To no one’s surprise, given our current political climate, the statement generated angry soundbite commentary. One tweet claimed that other countries had “emptied their jails and mental institutions and sent them on the way to [American flag emoji].” “Illegal immigrants,” complained another user, “did not knock on the door[;] they broke the window and snuck through the backdoor.” Two weeks later, another migrant story spewed out of the ugly underbelly of social media: Haitian immigrants, it was claimed, were eating cats, dogs, and geese in Ohio.
From the Editor’s Desk
The September issue of the journal is usually available on the first of the month. That date has also come to have particular significance for many of us, but for an entirely different reason. In 2015, Pope Francis designated September 1 as the “World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.”1 Other Western Christian communities had already been celebrating the day with creation-themed prayer, and with Francis’s act, the day has truly gained wide and deep ecumenical purchase. The history of the celebration in Western churches can be traced to Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios’s 1989 invitation to “the entire Christian world,” in which he asked that September 1 be designated a day of “prayers and supplications to the Maker of all, [offered] both as thanksgiving for the great gift of Creation and as petitions for its protection and salvation.”2
From the Editor’s Desk
Five months after the start of his pontificate, Pope Francis sat down with Antonio Spadaro, SJ for a series of interviews that were later translated and then published simultaneously in sixteen Jesuit journals around the world. The resulting text, along with his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (published three months later), anticipates the leitmotifs that would recur in Francis’s teachings. One of these is the importance of encounter: “We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.”1 Similarly, in Evangelii Gaudium, the pope “invite[s] all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them. . . . No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her.”2