VATICAN CITY (RNS) — At a Mass in the Sistine Chapel on Friday (May 9) attended by the cardinals who had elected him their leader the day before, Pope Leo XIV laid out his missionary vision for the church. But first he told the cardinals that his leadership would continue to depend on them.
“Through the ministry of Peter, you have called me to carry the cross and to be blessed with that mission,” he said in English before he began his homily, “and I know I can rely on each and every one of you to walk with me as we continue, as a church, as a community of friends of Jesus, as believers, to announce the good news, to announce the Gospel.”
Drawing from the day’s reading, Leo XIV said his election was “for the sake of the entire mystical body of the Church” so that she may be “an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illuminates the dark nights of this world.”
As he preached in the frescoed hall, painted by the famed artists of the Italian Renaissance, Leo XIV said this goal can be achieved “not so much through the magnificence of her structures or the gr …