The Cardinal Archbishop of Singapore has defended Catholics who are attached to the traditional Latin Mass.

In an interview given to Italian media, Cardinal William Goh Seng Chye also said he believes Pope Leo XIV “will not be ambiguous” on matters of teaching and doctrine .

In the interview with La Bussola, the cardinal spoke candidly about pressing matters for the Catholic Church – ranging from persecution in Asia to sexuality and liturgy.

US Vice-President JD Vance has revealed that he made a conscious decision not to kiss the papal ring of Pope Leo XIV when he met the new pontiff, due to his political role for the United States and despite being a convert to Catholicism.

His comments come in an interview on the “Interesting Times” podcast hosted by Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist at the New York Times, and which occurred while the two men were in Rome for Pope Leo XIV’s official inauguration Mass on 18 May.

An American rabbi has voiced optimism for Catholic-Jewish relations after the election of Pope Leo XIV, saying his pontificate marks an opportunity for renewal given a spike in tensions during the last months of Pope Francis’s papacy.

His comments come during heightening tensions over the war in Gaza. On Wednesday night, 21 May, in downtown Washington, DC, two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.

The Lionsgate film studio has confirmed that it will partner with Mel Gibson for his latest production The Resurrection of the Christ, the follow-up to his landmark 2004 film The Passion of the Christ.

The company announced 15 May that it was teaming up with Gibson and his Icon Productions banner partner Bruce Davey on the production and will distribute the movie worldwide, reports The Hollywood Reporter. The deal marks a significant step in terms of momentum for the production of a film that has been in the works for close to a decade.

President Donald Trump has met the eldest brother of Pope Leo XIV at the White House.

The meeting with Louis Prevost, 73, took place on Tuesday, 20 May. Earlier in the day, while speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, President Donald Trump said that he likes Pope Leo XIV, 69, and was looking forward to meeting the Pope’s brother later that day, reports the US-based Catholic News Agency (CNA).

“I like the pope and I like the pope’s brother,” Trump told reporters, while noting that the Pope’s elder brother “is a major MAGA fan” (alluding to the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan).

“I look forward to getting him to the White House,” Trump said. “I want to shake his hand. I want to give him a big hug.”

In his first public general audience address, Pope Leo XIV has said he will maintain his predecessor’s focus on Jesus Christ as a source of hope during the ongoing Jubilee year, and prayed for the people of Gaza.

He focused during his address on the famous Parable of the Sower, while also drawing a parallel between it and one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings.

At the start of the 21 May general audience, after the Gospel was read aloud in various languages – almost exclusively by women, apart from the reader for the Arabic language – Pope Leo announced his decision to resume Pope Francis’s reflection on “Jesus Christ Our Hope” as his weekly catechesis topic during the 2025 Jubilee of Hope.

The US president has claimed that Pope Leo XIV is keen to host peace talks at the Vatican to attempt to end the war in Ukraine.

The comments from Donald Trump came in a typically blustery – and at times confusing – message on his Truth Social social media platform

“Just completed my two hour call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” the US president says. “I believe it went very well. Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War.”

Pope Leo XIV has been officially invited to the White House in his capacity as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

US Vice-President JD Vance handed the new pontiff a letter from US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump – reportedly a practising Catholic – inviting him to visit “as soon as [he] possibly can”, the BBC reports.

The British broadcaster notes that in a subsequent statement, the Holy See said both sides had expressed satisfaction with relations between the US and Vatican during face-to-face talks that occurred at the Vatican on Monday, 19 May.

Dear Brother Cardinals,
Brother Bishops and Priests,
Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps,

Greetings to the pilgrims who have come for the Jubilee of the Confraternities!

Brothers and sisters, I greet all of you with a heart full of gratitude at the beginning of the ministry that has been entrusted to me. St Augustine wrote: “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, I:1,1).

After attending Pope Leo XIV’s installation Mass, United States Vice President JD Vance held private meetings on Monday with the pontiff and other senior Vatican officials. The discussions focused on religious freedom and the need for negotiation in regions of conflict.

According to a Vatican communiqué issued on 19 May, Vance and the Pope held a private meeting that morning, lasting approximately 45 minutes, from around 7:56 a.m. to 8:41 a.m. Following this, Vance met with the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, British Archbishop Paul Gallagher.

“During the cordial talks held at the Secretariat of State, satisfaction at the good bilateral relations was reiterated, and the collaboration between Church and State was discussed, as well as some matters of special relevance to ecclesial life and religious freedom,” the statement said.

So far, Pope Leo XIV has leaned fairly heavily into the legacy of his storied predecessor, Leo XIII, the long-reigning pope elected as a compromise candidate who was expected to live only a few years in office but gave the Church and the world – among other things – the seminal document on Catholic social teaching.

Leo XIV quoted Leo XIII in his first official remarks to cardinals following his election on 8 May, and again in his homily during his official inauguration this Sunday.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has journeyed to Tullamore, Ireland, to visit his old teacher following the Conclave.

Sister Mary Bosco Daly, a Sister of Mercy who is now 100 years old, was one of three Irish sisters who travelled to Holy Infant School, Missouri, to teach in the 1950s. There she taught the eight-year-old Timothy Dolan, the future Archbishop of New York.

Sister Mary entered religious life after being inspired by a neighbour who had become a nun. She made her first profession on 20 August 1947, and her final profession on 20 August 1950.

Pope Leo XIV has formally begun his pontificate with an inaugural Mass in St Peter’s Square, drawing an estimated 250,000 pilgrims to witness the inauguration of the first American Pope. The crowd size was broadly similar to that which gathered for Pope Francis more than a decade ago.

The newly elected Pontiff entered the square for the first time in his open-top popemobile and was presented with the customary pallium and Fisherman’s Ring, symbols of the Petrine office.

At his official inauguration, Pope Leo XIV said his “first great desire” was for a united Church, “a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.”

In his homily at Mass in St Peter’s Square on Sunday, the Pope began with the words of Saint Augustine: “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

The former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who once led his Order of Saint Augustine, quoted the early Church Father in his homily: “The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their brothers and sisters and who love their neighbour.”

“Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 7:34)

In this month of May, dedicated to Mary, we can reflect on how she lived her Son’s new commandment of love.

By considering how Mary was loved by Jesus, we will see how she is called to love us.

Mary was loved by Christ from the very moment of her conception, and in every moment of her life until her glorious coronation in heaven. Psalm 45:9 foreshadowed this climactic moment of Jesus’s love for her: “At your right hand stands the queen in gold of Ophir.”

One of the delights that begins to unfold in the process of becoming Catholic is a growing realisation of how, within the Catholic perceptive imagination, matter and spirit are infused and intermingled, and the mending of the fractured duality between spirit and matter that Enlightenment culture engendered is achieved.

The Liturgy of the Hours contains the wonderful Benedicite, omnia opera Domini – a canticle of Creation containing verses of The Song of the Three Children. St Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of the Sun, mirrors this exquisite poetry celebrating an animated universe, sentient of God’s love, joining the angelic order in hymns of praise, whether or not the human beings living at the centre of the created order either feel it or join in.

In our household we have five children ranging from 18 to five years old, and with that come many highs and lows in daily life. The life lessons are, like the family, plentiful. On a good day I like to think that because children are like sponges, they are absorbing life skills in a way that is good for them and for those around them. On a bad day, I think there’s too much stress and “mood management”.

Pope Leo XIV has said that peaceful civil societies cannot be built up and maintained without investing in traditional marriage and protecting the lives of the most vulnerable, including unborn children.

In an address to the Diplomatic Corps to the Holy See, the American pontiff gave his first major indication that he would end prevailing doctrinal ambiguity over marriage in the Catholic Church.

The Chicago-born Pope’s comments also reveal the importance to him of the role of marriage in regenerating dissolute western societies in particular.

On 12 May 1879, Pope Leo XIII raised John Henry Newman to the Sacred College of Cardinals. The biglietto which he received from the Secretariat of State notifying him of the Holy Father’s decision caused Newman to make one of his most significant speeches in reply.

It was the plan of the Duke of Norfolk, one of Newman’s advocates in England, to ask Pope Leo to acknowledge Newman’s loyalty to the Roman Church –  which had been unjustly called into question by some of his fellow Catholics – by making him a cardinal. Yet even before his election to the papacy, then then-Archbishop Pecci had come to know of Newman’s influence through the Oxford Movement.

Pope Leo XIV has discussed how vital the Christian East is both for the Catholic Church and for the whole world, and said that the Holy See is ready to do everything it can to help bring peace to those parts of it blighted by conflict.

Describing a “great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in [Eastern] liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety”, the new pontiff was speaking to participants in the Jubilee of the Oriental Churches in the Vatican’s Audience Hall on 14 May.

He said it is important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, “a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity.”