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Recently, several of America’s top political leaders blithely made assertions about Pope Leo XIV that struck me as further from the truth as earth is from Alpha Centauri.

Nevertheless, their multi-day, derogatory pontifications about the leader of the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church, who did not speak in Ex Cathedra to his holier-than-thou critics, got me thinking about people who, without an “Amen” of partisanship, pray for peace.

That’s what some people do. They pray for peace as the world texts itself to sleep.

About a year ago the white chimney smoke that rose above the Sistine Chapel blew Robert Prevost into Leo, the 267th Pope. 

He had read The Confessions of St. Augustine, but did he dream of them? Did he listen to Bob Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” and lean into its empathy?

Before he went to his first Chicago White Sox game did he know about Luke Appling?

Before he took his first “red-eye” flight to Vatican City he pressed his fingers into the hands of Peru’s poor, shook hands with their sorrows, tasted their nitty gritty, and dined on hungry prayers with them.

Today, like the millennia of days humanity has shuffled forward, despite its too often hate filled history, people in and out of the headlines still pray for peace.

Although the political leaders of his day were sharply critical of him, one thought provoking, religious man long ago said, “Blessed are the peace makers” as most of his world nightly cried itself to sleep.