Pope Leo XIV called the worldwide body of the faithful to pray and fast for peace this coming Friday, August 22, the memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Mary is the Mother of believers here on earth,” Leo said at the end of his general audience on Wednesday, “and is also invoked as Queen of Peace, while our earth continues to be wounded by wars in the Holy Land, in Ukraine, and in many other regions of the world.”

Leo invited “all the faithful to devote the day of 22 August to fasting and prayer, imploring the Lord to grant us peace and justice, and to dry the tears of those who suffer as a result of the ongoing armed conflicts.”

“Mary, Queen of Peace,” Leo prayed, “intercede so that peoples may find the path to peace.”

The pope’s appeal followed a catechesis in which Leo reflected on John’s account of the Last Supper, especially on the mystery of forgiveness, dramatized in Christ’s offering a morsel of food to the traitor Judas Iscariot.

Leo called the episode “one of the most striking and luminous gestures in the Gospel,” saying it was “not only a gesture of sharing,” but “much more; it is love’s last attempt not to give up.”

Judas, however, rejects Christ’s offer.

“This passage strikes us,” Leo said, “as if evil, hidden until then, manifested itself after love showed its most defenseless face.”

“Precisely for this reason,” Leo said, “that morsel is our salvation: Because it tells us that God does everything – absolutely everything – to reach us, even in the hour when we reject him.”

“It is here that forgiveness reveals all its power and manifests the true face of hope. It is not forgetfulness; it is not weakness,” Leo said. “Jesus’s love does not deny the truth of pain,” Leo said, “but it does not allow evil to have the last word.”

Peace and forgiveness – Christ’s free gifts – which do not allow evil the final say, are themes Leo first addressed from the loggia above St. Peter’s Basilica on the evening of his election.

“Peace be with all of you!” were Leo XIV’s very first words to the faithful.

“God loves us,” Leo also said that evening, “God loves you all, and evil will not prevail!”

Leo has returned to both themes – peace and forgiveness – on several occasions during his first months in office, and they are fast becoming a leitmotiv of his still very young pontificate.

In a message to the AI For Good summit in June, the pope explicitly invoked the famous description of peace as “the tranquility of order” first articulated by St. Augustine of Hippo, the spiritual father of the man who has become Leo XIV.

In his address to the corps of diplomats accredited to the Holy See on May 17, Leo said peace “is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words.”

The “heart” is another quintessentially Augustinian theme.

For St. Augustine, the heart is not only or even primarily an organ with a physiological function and purpose, but the seat of our inmost desire.

Cor in Latin, the heart is where we find God waiting for us.

It bears mention here, perhaps, that Cor ad cor loquitur – “Heart speaks unto heart” – is the motto of St. John Henry Newman, the great 19^th century English convert to Catholicism and Oratorian priest, whom Leo XIII created cardinal in 1879.

Newman was canonized in 2019, after being beatified in 2010, and on the last day of July Leo XIV announced plans to declare St. John Heny Newman a Doctor of the Church.

Among the flurry of pieces this past weekend marking Leo’s first 100 days in office – reports, retrospectives, analyses, commentaries – local NBC 5Chicago had an exclusive interview with Leo’s brother John, in which the elder Prevost (John is the middle, Louis Jr. is the oldest, and Robert – now Leo XIV – is the youngest) called his brother “a pope of the people.”

While John Prevost’s view may be fairly said to be partial, the faithful – especially the youth – have been responding well to Leo, who drew a million people to a jubilee Mass for young people on August 3.

There, too, Leo spoke of the vital importance of cultivating sincere hearts.

“We are not made for a life where everything is taken for granted and static,” Leo told the young people gathered for Mass at Rome’s Tor Vergata Park, “but for an existence that is constantly renewed through gift of self in love.”

“This is why we continually aspire to something ‘more’ that no created reality can give us,” Leo said, “we feel a deep and burning thirst that no drink in this world can satisfy.”

“Knowing this,” Leo said, “let us not deceive our hearts by trying to satisfy them with cheap imitations!”

Vatican watchers are waiting for Leo to make the big decisions and the hard decisions that must come, but perhaps Leo has already more than begun to disclose his program: He intends to be a pope of the heart.