The Sayable: Pope Leo, Evil & the Rosary
Pope Leo, Evil & the Rosary
That strange phrase on the night of his election
Delia Buckley Gallagher
One thing stood out to me on the night that Pope Leo XIV was elected during his first greeting from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. Amidst the cheers and celebration of the moment and his words about peace and remembering Pope Francis, he said this:
“Evil shall not prevail!”“God loves us all and evil shall not prevail. We are all in God’s hands.”
This phrase hit me because “evil” is a powerful word, with definite spiritual connotations, and seemed like a kind of forewarning that perhaps even Pope Leo did not know the full meaning of.
It also struck me because having covered three conclaves, I have noticed that the Pope’s words on the night of his election foreshadow themes of the pontificate.
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One of the Catholic Church’s longstanding antidotes to evil is the rosary. I note that in his visit to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of Pompeii on Friday, the one-year anniversary of his election, “to place my service under the protection of the Holy Virgin,” Pope Leo recalled Pope Leo XIII’s “extensive Magisterium on the Holy Rosary.”
Leo XIII devoted many encyclicals to the power of the Rosary as protection against spiritual and temporal evil.
“No earthly power will save the world,” Leo XIV said Friday in Pompeii, “but only the divine power of love, this divine power of love that Jesus, the Lord, has revealed to us and given us. Let us believe in Him, let us hope in Him, let us follow Him!”
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