267 of 267 · Reigning

Pope Leo the Fourteenth

Bishop of Rome, 2025 – present

Pope Leo XIV singing the Pater Noster in Latin.

In this chair

Robert Francis Prevost, of Chicago, an Augustinian, elected 8 May 2025. The first pope born in the United States. In September 2026 he goes to France — Paris, Metz, and Lourdes — walking the same road Pius IX’s Church received in 1858.

Signs of this pontificate

Wonders this archive keeps that belong to the years he sat, or that he himself stood before.

MarianChurch-approved

Our Lady of Lourdes

Massabielle, Lourdes1858

Between 11 February and 16 July 1858, in a limestone cave on the edge of Lourdes that the town used as a rubbish dump, a fourteen-year-old miller’s daughter named Bernadette Soubirous saw a young woman in white eighteen times. The woman spoke the dialect of the valley. She asked for prayer, for penance, for a spring of water, for a chapel, and for a procession. On 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, she gave a name the child had never been taught: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The bishop of Tarbes judged the apparitions worthy of belief in 1862. The spring still runs. The sick still come. Bernadette died at thirty-five, still ill, in a convent at Nevers.

Return to the rail — scroll left for Peter.