Full text: Pope Leo XIV’s Angelus address given October 25, 2026
Pope Leo XIV’s Oct. 25 Angelus address centered on Jesus’ commandments to love God with one’s whole heart, soul and mind, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. He said authentic love for God is a response to God’s love and must involve the whole person. The Pope taught that love of God and neighbor are inseparable, and that love gives faith, good works and hope their meaning. After the Angelus, he expressed concern about the grave humanitarian situation in Yemen.
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Pope Leo XIV’s October 25 Angelus address centered on love of God and neighbor, which he described as the heart of Christian faith. After the prayer, he appealed for relief and peace in Yemen, condemned an attack on worshippers in Jordan, and urged dialogue among nations and religions.
Reflecting on Matthew’s Gospel, Leo said love of God is not merely acknowledgment that God exists, but a personal relationship involving the whole person—heart, soul and mind. He described love not as an imposed obligation but as a response to God’s love, which comes first.
The pope linked the command to love God with the command to love one’s neighbor. He said closeness to God enables people to see themselves and others through Christ’s perspective, overcome selfishness and make their lives a gift to others. Without love, he said, faith loses its essence and good works risk becoming “mere moralism.”
Leo invoked St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who wrote that love makes the members of the Church act. He concluded by asking for the grace of a new heart capable of living the greatest commandments and for the Virgin Mary’s intercession.
After the Angelus, Leo expressed concern about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, particularly in Taiz, where people are facing shortages of food, water and medical care. He called for hostilities to stop and for the people of Yemen and the wider region to be guaranteed the right to live in peace.
He also offered prayers for those killed or injured in a terrorist attack on worshippers at the Orthodox Church of Saint George in Hamoud, Jordan, and expressed solidarity with the church community and the country.
The pope invited people to pray for peace ahead of an October 27 gathering in Assisi of church leaders and religious leaders marking 40 years since a meeting convened by St. John Paul II. He said wars sow death and destruction while impoverishing and harming the world, and called for choices that foster dialogue and peace.
Leo welcomed pilgrims and groups from Spain, Ireland and Poland, as well as Italian government protocol officials and members of associations and local communities. He closed by wishing those present a happy Sunday.
The unity of love for God and neighbor in Christian moral theology
Christian moral theology holds that love of God and love of neighbor are distinct in their object but inseparable in the life of charity. Love of God is the source, measure, and final end of Christian love; love of neighbor is its necessary expression in concrete life. Neither can replace the other: religious devotion without care for people becomes barren, while service detached from God loses the specifically Christian source and horizon of charity.
Jesus presents love of God and love of neighbor as the two great commandments on which the Law and the Prophets depend. The commandments are not identical: God is loved as God, the supreme good; a neighbor is loved as a creature made and loved by God. Yet Christ binds them together so closely that fidelity to one cannot be separated from fidelity to the other. John Paul II emphasizes that Christ neither ranks neighbor-love above love of God nor treats them as separate paths. Their unity is shown both in his teaching and in his life, especially in the Cross, where his love for the Father and for humanity is one undivided act of self-giving.
This unity is not merely an ideal sentiment. Christian love becomes visible in the way a person treats others. John’s letter makes the point starkly: a person cannot credibly claim to love the unseen God while hating a brother or sister whom he sees. The Good Samaritan parable and Jesus’ teaching about the final judgment likewise show that love of God has moral consequences: it calls for mercy and practical care.
The unity begins not with human achievement but with God’s initiative. Benedict XVI explains that Christian love is a response to God, who “has loved us first.” Because God’s love is given, the command to love is not simply an external demand to produce something impossible by unaided effort. It is a gift received and then shared. Charity—Christian love rooted in God—is therefore more than friendliness or natural sympathy: it is a participation in the love God gives.
That matters especially when love is difficult. Christian neighbor-love is not confined to people we like, know, or find easy to help. Benedict describes it as learning to see another person through the perspective of Christ, including someone toward whom our feelings are not warm. This does not mean pretending that all relationships are easy or that appropriate boundaries and justice do not matter. It means that another person’s worth is not measured by our attraction, agreement, or personal benefit.
The command to love one’s neighbor “as oneself” also rests on the dignity of the person. A theological interpretation in the supplied scholarship stresses that the human person is loved into existence by God and has worth in God’s sight. So loving a neighbor is not merely using that person as a means to one’s own religious or social goals; it is willing the good of someone whom God has created and loves.
The two dimensions correct one another. On one side, religious practice can become merely formal if it is disconnected from concern for others. Benedict warns against seeking to perform religious duties while failing to heed one’s neighbor: such a relationship with God becomes “proper,” but loveless. Attention to another person can also make one more receptive to recognizing God’s love.
On the other side, Christian service is not simply humanitarian action with a religious label added. It is shaped by the conviction that God is the source of love and that the neighbor is to be seen in the light of Christ. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church draws out the public consequences: the relationship with God and responsibility for neighbors are bound together in the concrete circumstances of history, and this connection underlies commitments to justice and solidarity in social, economic, and political life.
This does not mean that every act of love must be explicitly religious in appearance, or that non-Christians are incapable of genuine goodness. Rather, it describes the specifically Christian understanding of why neighbor-love matters and what gives it its deepest source and orientation. The Christian is called to serve the neighbor because love comes from God and because the neighbor is not outside God’s concern. The supplied sources affirm this theological grounding; they do not claim that Christians have a monopoly on acts of compassion.
Calling love the heart of Christian morality does not mean that “love” is a license to ignore moral duties or decide that whatever feels compassionate is right. The Ukrainian Catholic Catechism describes love as the substance and motivation of Christian moral action and says that the law is fulfilled through love. John Paul II likewise connects genuine love of neighbor with keeping the commandments. Love is not opposed to moral truth; it gives moral obedience its inner purpose and animates concrete acts.
This point guards against reducing morality either to rule-following without love or to subjective good intentions without regard for what is right. Rules detached from charity can be observed coldly; claimed love detached from moral truth can become self-deception. In Christian moral theology, charity seeks the neighbor’s true good, not merely immediate approval or comfort. The sources supplied establish the connection between love and the commandments, though they do not provide a full treatment of how to resolve particular moral disputes.
The unity of the two loves does not make them interchangeable. Aquinas clarifies this by distinguishing two ways of comparing them. Considered separately, love of God is greater, because God is loved for God’s own sake and is the ultimate end of human life. But when neighbor-love is considered as love “for God’s sake,” it already includes love of God; a supposed love of God that excludes the neighbor is incomplete. Aquinas therefore distinguishes the priority of God as the ultimate end from the inseparability of love for God and practical love for others.
That distinction helps avoid two opposite misunderstandings. Christianity does not teach that service to others makes worship or the personal relationship with God unnecessary. Nor does it permit a person to use worship, prayer, or religious identity as an excuse for indifference to people. Love of God is primary as the source and end; love of neighbor is indispensable as its lived expression.
In practice, this unity means that prayer and worship should form a person for merciful, just, and attentive relationships—and that serving others can deepen awareness of God’s love. Benedict points to the saints’ encounter with the Eucharistic Lord and their service to others as mutually reinforcing: their service was renewed by their encounter with Christ, and that encounter gained realism and depth in their service. Christian moral life is thus not divided into “religion” on one side and ordinary responsibilities on the other. It is one life of love, received from God and made concrete toward the neighbor.