Pope Leo XIV made a private visit on July 20 to the Abbey of Montecassino, where St. Benedict of Nursia is buried.
As announced by the Holy See Press Office, the pontiff made the trip while on vacation at Castel Gandolfo, where he will remain from July 5-27. At Montecassino, he prayed at the tomb of St. Benedict, considered the father of Western monasticism, “entrusting him with his plea for peace in those regions of the world marked by bloodshed and conflict.”
Pope Leo XIV lights a candle at the tomb of St. Benedict of Nursia at the Abbey of Montecassino on July 20, 2026. | Credit: Vatican Media
The pope also enjoyed lunch with the Benedictine community at the abbey.
Leo’s surprise visit to Montecassino was his first since his election to the papacy in 2025. While on vacation that year, he also made a surprise visit to the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie della Mentorella in Guadagnolo, where he also prayed for peace.
The Abbey of Montecassino, founded by St. Benedict in 529 AD, will celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of its founding in 2029.
Leo’s visit to Montecassino was also his third public appearance (outside his Sunday Angelus) during his Castel Gandolfo vacation, following his lunch with the poor on July 11 and a summer concert on July 18. Except for his Sunday Angelus, all private and public audiences, including the Wednesday general audience, are suspended during his vacation.
A new medal named after Pope Leo XIV to recognize individuals who have worked toward ecological sustainability will be introduced in October 2026.
The pontiff will personally present the “Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal” at the International Sustainability Conference, to be held at the Patristic Institute Augustinianum in Rome from Oct. 12–15. The award ceremony will take place on Oct. 13 in the Borgo Laudato Si’ garden, part of the Pontifical Gardens in Castel Gandolfo.
The award and conference were established by Villanova University, a Catholic liberal arts university in Pennsylvania. This is where Leo XIV, formerly Robert Prevost, earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1977 and an honorary doctorate in 2014. The Dicastery for Integral Human Development will also sponsor the event.
The inaugural Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal is a permanent award that will be presented by the university every two years.
An award to reflect the care for our common home
In a July 20 press release, Villanova University’s president, Father Peter Donohue, OSA, explained that the medal will recognize individuals who embody the university’s core belief in ecological stewardship and the common good.
“The Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal reflects a deeply held belief at Villanova University: that care for our common home and care for one another are inseparable,” Donohue said. “By recognizing leaders whose work advances both environmental stewardship and the common good, we hope to inspire meaningful and lasting impact in communities around the world.”
Villanova University, where Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, studied from 1973-77. | Credit: Amy Lutz/Shutterstock
The conference, themed “Responding to the Cries of the Earth and the Poor,” will gather more than 300 academics, church officials, and stakeholders for discussions on integral ecology.
The recipient of the Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal may come from any field and will be evaluated based on their efforts to advance sustainability and equity.
Another Villanova initiative to honor Leo XIV
The medal is not the only recent initiative by Villanova University to honor its most famous alumnus.
In July 2026, the university co-sponsored the 38th Annual Liberty Medal ceremony in Philadelphia, which awarded the pope the Liberty Medal ahead of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
On Nov. 1, the university’s basketball team will open its NCAA season in Rome with a men’s and women’s doubleheader against Notre Dame. The initiative was also inspired by Leo XIV, who will meet both teams in an audience ahead of the games.
Pope Leo XIV warned Sunday against imagining God as “a powerful figure who imposes himself by force, who takes over and dominates, or who arrives triumphantly,” and urged Christians to embrace a Gospel-centered approach marked by humility and trust.
Speaking before the Angelus prayer in Liberty Square at Castel Gandolfo, where he is spending several weeks of rest through Monday, July 27, the pope reflected on the day’s Gospel reading.
Following the parable of the sower, Jesus addresses the crowds through the images of the good wheat and the weeds, the mustard seed and the yeast in the dough, the pope noted.
“These three short parables recall the coming of the Kingdom of God in history, its action in human lives, and the way it grows, expands and transforms the world from within,” Pope Leo said.
Through these images, he continued, Jesus warns against thinking of God principally in terms of power, domination and triumph.
“Instead, God favors smallness, a sign of his discreet love, by which he leaves us free to accept or reject him,” the pope said. “His love makes its presence felt even among the weeds, acts in a hidden and invisible way like the smallest of all seeds, and leavens the dough without making a sound.”
God favors smallness
Pope Leo said believers sometimes expect God to act in dramatic and immediately visible ways.
“We sometimes expect God to do something spectacular; we want him to intervene from on high, immediately uprooting the weeds of evil,” he said.
“We imagine a strong and powerful God, and, unfortunately, we also model our way of being Christians and way of being the Church on this image.”
The Kingdom of God, however, continues to grow quietly even amid evil, the pope said.
“However, the Kingdom of God spreads even amidst the weeds, requiring us to train our vision so we can discern the good that sprouts despite the darkness of evil, and avoiding rash judgments,” he said.
The image of the smallest seed, Pope Leo explained, teaches Christians to be patient as God works through ordinary events and gradual processes.
“It comes like the smallest of seeds and thus calls for patience in accompanying these processes, so that we can recognize it in the little things of daily life and in the simplicity of ordinary existence,” he said.
The kingdom also “grows invisibly like yeast in flour,” the pope continued, freeing believers from discouragement and inviting them to maintain faith even when God appears absent.
“In fact, he is always with us, and his love is always ready to help us,” he said.
Pope Leo then urged Catholics to apply this divine way of acting to both their personal lives and the life of the Church.
“God’s way of acting must also become the way in which we live, both as individuals and as the Church, amidst the reality that surrounds us,” he said.
“We are called to adopt a Gospel-centered approach, without hastily opposing others through arrogant judgments, without imposing ourselves through power and force, and without losing trust in God’s work.”
The pope cited a reflection given by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, during the Jubilee of Catechists and Religion Teachers in the Holy Year 2000.
“As the then-Cardinal Ratzinger said, it is a matter of submitting ourselves to the logic of the seed — which is not that of success and greatness, but that of making ourselves small and serving others,” Pope Leo said.
By embracing this approach, he concluded, Christians can become instruments through which the Gospel quietly transforms the world.
“In this way, we will become like small seeds of the Gospel that sprout, and leavens of love that transform the dough of the world.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
The Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), also known as the Vatican Bank, has named Giovanni Boscia as its next director general.
He will succeed Gian Franco Mammì, who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 and has led the IOR’s day-to-day operations since 2015.
Boscia, 55, will assume his new role on Oct. 1. According to a July 15 press release from the IOR, his appointment “reflects a robust governance structure based on a clear distinction between the supervisory, governing, and management bodies, and designed to ensure transparency and stability.”
The IOR was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage the Holy See’s assets and centralize the worldwide administration of the Catholic Church’s funds. It is also the central financial institution of Vatican City State.
Personnel changes and a mixed year at the IOR
Boscia’s appointment is the second leadership change at the IOR in 2026, following François Pauly’s appointment as its president. Pauly serves as a nonexecutive member assisting with oversight, whereas Boscia will oversee the bank’s daily operations as director general.
The leadership changes come amid a mixed year for the IOR. In its annual reports published in May, the bank reported a net profit of 51 million euros (about $58.4 million) for 2025, up 55.5% from the 32.8 million euros ($37.5 million) recorded the previous year.
In April, the Vatican detected 78 suspicious activities involving accounts linked to the IOR.
More than 3 decades of experience in finance
Before joining the IOR in 2019, Boscia spent more than 30 years in international financial markets across several firms, including Salomon Brothers, Citigroup, RBS, and Credit Suisse First Boston.
He graduated with honors with a master’s degree in finance from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and an executive MBA from London Business School.
In 2019, he went to Rome to serve at the IOR as its head of finance and chief financial officer. He was promoted to head of investments in 2021 and to deputy director general in 2023.
When the pope speaks out on matters of war and peace, is he doing so as a religious authority or a political leader? A U.S. diplomat and a Vatican official recently expressed contrasting views on the question.
According to the New York Times last week, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See Brian Burch argued that when Pope Leo spoke out against the war in Iran, “he was not doing so as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ.”
“When the pope acts as the sovereign leader of the Holy See, he is coequal with world leaders,” Burch is quoted as telling the NYT in an interview published online July 9.
While the Vatican News editorial did not mention Burch by name, it addressed the ambassador’s argument in the NYT interview.
Pope Leo XIV has dinner with U.S. Ambassador Brian Burch and his family at the ambassador’s residence in Rome on July 4, 2026. | Credit: U.S. Embassy to the Holy See
“Any glorification or exaggeration of the pope’s role as head of state, any emphasis on the importance of this role, is therefore misleading because it comes at the expense of his one true mission as universal shepherd,” Tornielli wrote.
A spokeswoman for Burch declined to comment.
Expert weighs in
Father Roberto Regoli, an expert on papal history and diplomacy from the 19th to 21st centuries, explained that while the pope is the head of a state, “it is just functional to his personal service as a Church leader.”
“Vatican State is an enclave state … it is functional for the spiritual mission of the popes,” Regoli told EWTN News. “The pope normally speaks as a head of the Church.”
In the Vatican News editorial, Tornielli pointed to the 1929 Lateran Pacts, an agreement that resolved the issue of the temporal power of popes and gave the pope a small territory — less than 110 acres — but said that “does not mean that he acts or speaks as a politician when addressing issues concerning the affairs of humanity.”
Tornielli quoted St. Paul VI, who, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1965, said, referring to himself, that “he is your brother, and even one of the least among you who represent sovereign states, since he possesses — if you choose to consider us from this point of view — only a tiny and practically symbolic temporal sovereignty: the minimum needed in order to be free to exercise his spiritual mission and to assure those who deal with him that he is independent of any sovereignty of this world. He has no temporal power, no ambition to enter into competition with you.”
Father Roberto Regoli was appointed by the Vatican Secretariat of State in January 2026 as president of the board of directors of the Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation. | Credit: Photo courtesy of Father Roberto Regoli
Regoli noted that the political power of popes was different in the past, such as in the time of the Papal States. Being the head of a state today “is just functional to his personal service as a Church leader” to maintain his independence.
As the sovereign of an independent city-state, the pope has interactions with other states and multilateral institutions via apostolic nuncios and other delegates, who represent him to both the local Church and the state, Regoli said.
He added that these “diplomatic structures are in the function of papal politics,” which are “ecclesiastical politics” — that is, about the Church’s internal government.
Pope Leo himself, at the beginning of a speech to members of the Spanish Parliament in Madrid on June 8, explained in what capacity he addressed the politicians and the role of the Holy See on the international stage.
“I come before you,” he said, “as the bishop of Rome and shepherd of the Catholic Church, aware that the mission entrusted to the successor of the apostle Peter, as the principle and foundation of the unity of the bishops and the faithful, places the Holy See, in a special way, in dialogue with peoples and with states.”
Inspired by Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, more than 200 leading academics, innovators, and Nobel laureates signed a declaration in Rome on July 16 calling for responsible AI development and the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.
“We must disarm the next arms race, both AI and nuclear, before they define the next century as well,” the declaration stated.
According to Vatican News, the signing of the declaration for “an unarmed and disarming peace in the age of artificial intelligence, nuclear and autonomous weapons, new digital protocols, and emerging models of digital development” took place in the Giulio Cesare Hall at the Palazzo Senatorio, Rome’s city hall atop the Capitoline Hill.
The signing also concluded the Global Nobel Laureates Assembly on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear War, held July 14–16 at Borgo Laudato Si’, part of the Pontifical Gardens at Castel Gandolfo, where Pope Leo XIV is staying from July 5–27.
Among those present at the signing were the vicar general of the Diocese of Rome, Cardinal Baldassare Reina; the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri; and Hollywood actress Sharon Stone.
For an unarmed and disarming peace
The declaration called on governments and corporations to slow AI development, halt the expansion of nuclear arms, and work toward their total elimination.
“We call on governments, corporations, and international organizations to enable coordinated slowdown of frontier AI development,” the declaration stated. “We call for urgent, sustained, and good-faith negotiations leading, within an agreed and time-bound framework, to the verifiable and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons.”
According to a July 16 press release, the declaration and summit were inspired by Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
“Pope Leo XIV, invoking values shared across religious traditions, has called humanity toward an ‘unarmed and disarming peace.’”
A race for human survival
Speaking at the signing of the declaration, Reina explained its significance for humanity’s survival amid the threats of nuclear war and AI misuse.
"The declaration presented today reminds us with great clarity that no machine, no algorithm, and no autonomous system can be placed at the center of decisions upon which the survival of humanity depends,” Reina said.
Professor David Gross, a Nobel Prize laureate in physics and a professor of theoretical physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, emphasized the need for nuclear nations to adopt policies to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
“We are in the middle of an accelerated arms race,” Gross said.
“We ask that nuclear nations promote policies that reduce the risk of war, nuclear war, and annihilation.”
Pope Leo XIV, who has restored the papal tradition of spending part of the summer at Castel Gandolfo, is set to attend a classical concert there on July 18.
The “Concert in Honor of the Holy Father Leo XIV” will take place in the courtyard of the Apostolic Palace of Castel Gandolfo, where he is staying from July 5–27. The nearby Suburbicarian Diocese of Albano will offer the event as a gift to the pontiff to mark the renewal of the papal presence at the lakeside town, which is part of the diocese.
Leo XIV, as Cardinal Robert Prevost, was the titular cardinal-bishop of the Diocese of Albano before his election to the papacy in 2025.
Bishop Vincenzo Viva of Albano, in a July 16 press release from the diocese, described the concert as an expression of the diocese’s joy and closeness to the pope.
“The renewed presence of the Holy Father in our diocesan territory has filled our local Church and its inhabitants with joy,” Viva said in the statement. “We wish to offer this symphonic concert as a gesture of affection and communion, and the program we have designed reveals pages of rare splendor.”
The concert will feature classical repertoire by Niccolò Paganini and Vincenzo Bellini. It will be performed by the orchestra I Musici di Parma of Parma, Italy.
Pope Leo XIV decided to spend part of this summer on vacation at the Apostolic Palace of Castel Gandolfo after Pope Francis opted not to spend his summers there for his entire 12-year pontificate. The complex also includes the Pontifical Gardens, including the Borgo Laudato Si’ garden.
The July 18 concert will be Leo’s second public appearance (outside his Sunday Angelus) at Castel Gandolfo so far, following his lunch with the poor in the Borgo Laudato Si’ garden on July 11. With the exception of his Sunday Angelus, all private and public audiences, including the Wednesday general audience, are suspended during his vacation.
David Willey, a BBC correspondent whose career in Rome spanned more than 50 years and five papacies, died July 11 in Italy at the age of 93.
From being a student taking in the pomp of Pope Pius XII carried in a ceremonial throne to traveling the world with St. John Paul II to writing about the changes brought by Pope Francis, Willey saw “a complete revolution so that people saw the pope much more as a personality rather than in a hierarchical sense,” the journalist told EWTN News at his home in February.
Catholic background
David Douglas Willey was born in High Wycombe, in the county of Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, in December 1932. He grew up Catholic in nearby Marlow.
Willey’s first experience of Rome was a visit as a student, when he witnessed Pope Pius XII being carried through crowds in a gestatorial chair. “For me, the Vatican, St. Peter’s in Rome, was a spectacle, it was almost operatic,” he noted.
After studying law and modern languages at Cambridge, he moved to Rome as a trainee for Reuters.
He then left for stints in Algeria as a freelancer and subsequently East Africa as a correspondent for BBC. He also reported from Asia, including Saigon and Beijing, and then spent some time in London as the BBC’s assistant diplomatic correspondent.
He returned to Italy as BBC’s Rome correspondent in 1972 — and he never left.
David Willey, who died July 11, 2026, served as a BBC correspondent in Rome starting in 1972. He is seen here standing on a street in 1980. | Credit: Photo courtesy of BBC
“I never imagined I would be covering the Vatican [as a] correspondent when I was an altar boy at St. Peter’s Church in Marlow,” he said.
Willey explained that he no longer practiced the Catholic faith of his childhood but that he had “the greatest respect for the Catholic religion.”
His reporting on the Vatican was through this lens. “I always treated reporting for the Vatican as a secular matter rather than a religious one,” he said, adding that he still found “inspiration and pleasure in covering Vatican affairs” because he thought the pope and the Church had an important message in a world “torn by war and discord.”
Lengthy Rome career
During his more than five decades covering Rome and the Vatican, Willey witnessed dramatic technological changes both to journalism and to the Vatican’s own operations and communication.
Two episodes from his early days in Rome illustrate this, including a call to the Vatican switchboard asking to be connected to a cardinal.
He was immediately put through to Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who would later become the pope’s No. 2 as the Vatican secretary of state.
“An important cardinal in the Vatican because he dealt with what was called the Ostpolitik, the Vaticanʼs policy towards Eastern Europe, communist Eastern Europe, during the years of the Cold War,” Willey said, noting that he asked to speak and the cardinal invited him that very afternoon to his “palatial” apartment for what would become a three-and-a-half-hour conversation.
Willey recalled how, while a Reuters apprentice in the 1950s, international news agencies would pay a Vatican official for information. Once, on Easter Sunday, he was sent to wait at a bar close to the Vatican to pick up a text of the pope’s “urbi et orbi” blessing.
“That was how the system worked. The changes wrought by Vatican II were extraordinary in the sense that a whole department was set up in the Vatican dealing with relations with the media,” he noted.
During the pontificate of St. John Paul II, Willey joined the Polish pope on at least 40 of his international trips, nearly half of the jet-setting pope’s total apostolic journeys.
“We went all over the world,” Willey noted. “It added to my knowledge of the world immeasurably, but it also enabled me to see the Catholic Church as an international, worldwide body of believers, which you donʼt always understand when you live here in Europe or in Rome in particular.”
Veering from the prevailing idea that the faithful should come to see the pope in Rome, John Paul II went out “to meet his flock in person. And he did this with great panache,” the British journalist said.
“And by allowing journalists like me to join him on the papal plane; one day, for example, I found him sitting next to me at breakfast on the plane,” Willey recalled. “He used to get bored during his very long journeys across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans and he mingled with the journalists and sat down and actually talked to them.”
“I remember talking to him once about the usefulness of the United Nations, for example. He had some quite interesting things to say.”
Willey said he also had a memorable encounter with another living saint — Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
One day he rang up the Sisters of Charity in Rome to ask if he could interview Mother Teresa and was told they could arrange a meeting at the airport, in between her landing in Rome from India and before she would immediately depart again for Canada.
“We sat down together, and she was, I must say, great fun,” Willey recalled. “We had a very lively conversation in which she confided all sorts of little secrets to me, such as I said, ‘What do you do when you normally arrive in a new country?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I go to the local phone box and call up the head of state and ask him to send a car to meet me. I ring up the pope and he sends me a car.’”
“She was this combination of extreme saintliness and piety — and of course her work among the poor in India was completely a subject of which she was prepared to talk endlessly — but what I found was her sense of fun and her sense that the world was completely open to her,” the journalist said.
In 2003, Willey was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to broadcast journalism.
He wrote several books, including “God’s Politician,” a 1992 biography of John Paul II’s global impact. He also wrote about the start of Pope Francis’ pontificate in “The Promise of Francis: The Man, the Pope, and the Challenge of Change” in 2015.
Willey continued to be active into his 90s — including writing a final reflection on the Vatican following Pope Francis’ death in April 2025. Willey spent his final years in the quiet lakeside town of Trevignano Romano, about 30 miles north of Rome. He died on July 11 from heart failure, the BBC reported.
According to a statement from the society — whose members are known as Lefebvrists — the appeal was submitted to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 11, nine days after the group was declared to be in schism.
Invoking Canon 1353
The SSPX statement, published July 13, says that “through this appeal, the society wishes to exercise the right that the Church recognizes for any person who considers himself harmed by an administrative act to request its rectification, in a spirit of respect toward ecclesiastical authority and of faithful adherence to justice, truth, and the good of the Church.”
It adds that the appeal is "the prior requirement before the eventual filing of a hierarchical recourse" and "has the effect of suspending the execution of the decree, in accordance with Canon 1353 of the Code of Canon Law."
Canon 1353 states that an appeal or recourse against a judicial sentence or against a decree that imposes or declares any penalty has a suspensive effect.
“The Society of St. Pius X places this request in the hands of the competent authorities and entrusts this procedure to the prayers of all the faithful,” the statement concludes.
The appeal follows a letter the Lefebvrists addressed to Pope Leo XIV, published July 3, in which they reject the excommunications decreed by the Vatican after the illicit consecration of the four new bishops — measures they called “objectively unjust and invalid.”
Origins of the Lefebvrists
The group, founded by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970, holds as its purpose the preservation of the traditional liturgy that predates the reforms introduced after the Second Vatican Council, while maintaining its opposition to aspects of conciliar teaching on ecumenism, religious freedom, and collegiality.
Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 after consecrating four bishops without the permission of St. John Paul II. That sanction was lifted by Benedict XVI in 2009.
Two of the bishops Lefebvre consecrated — Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay — took part in the recent illicit consecration, which led to their being excommunicated once again.
The SSPX disregarded the Catholic Churchʼs warnings not to ordain new bishops, including an appeal from Leo XIV himself, who wrote to the society June 30: “With this spirit, and filled with Christian affection, I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: Please turn back! I ask you with all my heart: Please turn back!”
The superior general of the SSPX is the Italian priest Father Davide Pagliarani. According to the societyʼs statistics as of Dec. 1, 2025, it comprises 733 priests of 50 nationalities — not counting the six bishops it now has — with an average age of 47.
What is schism under canon law?
Canon 751 of the Code of Canon Law states that schism is “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” The penalty for this canonical offense is usually excommunication, as has happened with the SSPX.
Several bishops — including those of Panama and San Antonio, Texas — have warned the faithful not to take part in Masses or seek the sacraments from priests of the schismatic group.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News, and has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
Pope Leo XIV will launch a contemporary art exhibit focused on water at the Vatican Apostolic Library on Sept. 14.
The exhibit “AQVA Catastrophe and Wonder”will include artwork highlighting a “reflection on water as both a threat and a resource,” according to a July 12 press release from the library.
Notably, the pope will inaugurate the exhibition on his 71st birthday, which is Sept. 14.
“AQVA Catastrophe and Wonder” will include the works of French artist JR, American typographer Bill Moran, and Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini.
According to Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, the Holy See’s librarian and archivist, the exhibit will reflect the pontiff’s desire to bridge the past and the present.
“These exhibitions are intended to foster dialogue between contemporary art and the library’s centuries-old heritage,” Pagazzi said in the press release. “On several occasions, the pope has emphasized fidelity to the past and fidelity to the future. The present — including the present of this exhibition — can become a home where past and future meet as friends.”
The Vatican Apostolic Library is both the national library of Vatican City State and the library of the Holy See. It was established in 1475 by Pope Sixtus IV, making it one of the oldest in continuous existence. Beyond its extensive collection of important texts and manuscripts, it hosts an elaborate art collection, featuring frescoes and sculptures from the High Renaissance.
The display “AQVA Catastrophe and Wonder” will be open to visitors from Sept. 25, 2026, to May 14, 2027.
In 2025, the library held the “En Route” exhibition from Feb. 15 to Dec. 20, connecting historical journeys to modern pilgrimages through a collection of rare 19th-century travel documents and contemporary artistic interpretations. It marked the sixth installment in the library’s ongoing dialogue between its historical patrimony and contemporary art, which began in 2021.
During the 2025 Jubilee Year, the Dicastery for Culture and Education introduced Conciliazione 5, a one-room gallery space with a large window onto the main thoroughfare leading to St. Peter’s Basilica, Via della Conciliazione. Beyond the jubilee, the space continues to feature the works of different contemporary artists, making them visible to the tourists and pilgrims who pass the window every day on their way to the Vatican.
The Holy See has also participated in the Venice Biennale — an international artistic and cultural festival held annually in the northern Italian city — since 2013.
