How does God guide history by helping us when we fall? Leo XIV’s answer
Pope Leo XIV delivered his Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, October 4. Reflecting on the Gospel parable in Matthew 21:33–43, he said it sheds light on Jesus’ life and mission. The parable portrays Jesus as God’s Son, sent to bring salvation and life but rejected and condemned by those who should have welcomed him.
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Pope Leo XIV said God can bring redemption out of rejection and failure, and that people’s lives are never discarded. In his October 4 Angelus address, he connected this message to the Church’s need for renewal and to St. Francis of Assisi’s legacy of faith, fraternity, and peace.
Reflecting on the Gospel parable of the tenants, Leo described Jesus as God’s Son, rejected and condemned by those who should have welcomed him. The Pope said this points both to the cruelties present in human history and to the greater mercy of God.
He cited the image of the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, saying that evil does not defeat God’s will: God can transform it into redemption. He described this as God guiding history and coming to people’s aid when they fall, without discarding their lives.
Leo applied the parable’s vineyard image to the Church, saying that people build it up or damage it through their choices. On the 800th anniversary of St. Francis’s death, he recalled Francis as a devoted worker in the vineyard who, inspired by Christ, built his life on the foundation of Jesus.
The Pope highlighted Francis’s prayer, charity, and example of poverty and fraternity. He said Francis helped repair the Church through faith in Christ and by healing divisions with the witness of brotherly love.
Leo said Francis’s spiritual legacy continues to benefit the Church and the wider People of God. During the Franciscan Jubilee Year, he urged people to pray for peace and to work sincerely for harmony among peoples.
Divine providence transforms human rejection and failure into salvation history
Divine providence can bring good out of human rejection and failure, but this does not mean that rejection itself becomes good or that God causes people to sin. Human choices remain genuinely free; providence works through their consequences without excusing the wrong. The Catechism points to the clearest instance: humanity’s rejection and killing of Christ was a grave evil, yet God brought from it Christ’s glorification and our redemption.
The pattern appears throughout salvation history. Joseph’s brothers acted from malice when they sold him, but God used the consequences to preserve many lives. In the same way, Israel’s rejection of Christ became, in Paul’s account, an occasion for the Gospel to reach the Gentiles—without meaning that God willed Israel’s unbelief. Paul also insists that God has not abandoned his people and warns Gentile Christians against pride.
This is not a promise that every failure will quickly be repaired, or that suffering is secretly harmless. Providence does not spare people adversity; rather, God’s saving purpose can carry human tragedy without endorsing it, and call people to answer evil with good.
So the Cross is the decisive measure: apparent defeat does not have the final word, but neither is evil thereby made good. God can transform rejection into a path toward salvation while respecting human freedom and inviting our cooperation in the good.