It’s been a busy week at The Mark 5:19 Project—full of speaking, meetings, and travel. The kind of week where you’re moving quickly, focused, and collapsing in bed at night, tired. But alongside all of that busyness, I know that everybody is talking about something this Easter season.
Not the Resurrection, as much as I wish that were the case.
Instead, many of us have been trying to absorb a steady stream of public moments that are bombastic and outrageous. On Easter Sunday (!), Donald Trump posted, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The next week, he publicly lambasted Pope Leo XIV, a day after the Holy Father had led a global prayer for peace in the Middle East and beyond. Then he posted the AI-generated image of the himself dressed as Jesus Christ healing the sick, with fighter jets and a flag in the background. And somehow, the Avignon Papacy may be involved. Nobody can quite say.
Even writing that feels surreal. And the pace of it all has made it difficult to keep up (I’m aware I am omitting things.) By the time one moment registers, another replaces it. There is a kind of noise fatigue that can set in, where everything begins to blur together. It is a strange, ugly time.
I am not going to analyze the politics behind this. That would be a different essay. But I do want to name something that stood out to me.
On the Monday after the Pope Leo is tweet and “president Jesus” image, many people—Catholic and not—responded with a kind of clarity that cut through the noise. They simply said: NO. This is not right. This is not who we are. And just as importantly, they named what they were for. They stood with Jesus Christ, with the Church, and with the Gospel.
That response matters, because moments like this tend to reveal something. They press us, sometimes unexpectedly, into a decision. Not a partisan decision, but a spiritual one. They expose the quiet question underneath our lives: where do I stand?
St. Paul knew that moment well. Writing to the Romans from prison, under the authority of an empire that would eventually take his life, he says, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). This is not a comfortable statement. Paul is not speaking from safety or approval, but from confinement, from vulnerability, from a place where proclaiming the truth carries real consequences. And yet his instinct is not to retreat, but to speak.
Every so often, we are drawn into that same space. The question is similar. Will I align myself with the truth, even when it is uncomfortable? Will I remain grounded in the Gospel when the surrounding culture becomes distorted?
In that light, something about Pope Leo XIV becomes clearer. He is still relatively new to us and appears, by temperament, quiet and measured. But we know of his missionary formation as a member of the Augustinians, who served in a country that was not his homeland. And it is clear: there is a missionary instinct beneath that quiet. It is the instinct to speak the Gospel directly and clearly without needing to match the volume of the world, to pray for peace when others escalate conflict, and to remain faithful to a mission to proclaim the truth of Christ.
That is where this week has left me—with sadness in our political leaders, but also with gratitude. Occasionally, the fork in the road becomes sharp enough that it removes ambiguity. That one day, we were given a choice. And millions said, with St. Paul, and with Leo XIV, that we are not ashamed of the Gospel.
We can choose to stand with Christ, to remain rooted in the truth, and to live as people who seek the peace that comes from God. That is true power and no one can take that from us. May we be missionaries like this every day. Thank you, Pope Leo.
“Blessed are the peacemakers.”–Jesus Christ
