Vatican newspaper editor sees listening as major theme of Leo’s pontificate

July 08, 2025

The editor-in-chief of the Vatican newspaper, citing a recent papal address, sees listening as a major theme of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV.

in “Primum audire“ (Latin for “first to hear”), a front-page editorial of the July 5 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Andrea Monda wrote that “in the pontificate’s almost two months, the faithful and the entire world have already learned this first aspect of the style and teaching of Pope Prevost. The primacy of listening.”

Monda spoke of the need to “cleanse our ears, return to what we really are, listeners, listeners of words” amid all the background noise that “crowds the sound waves of our living environment.” Citing two Jesuits—Father Karl Rahner (1904-84) and Father Michael Paul Gallagher (1939-2015)—Monda explained:

Hearers of words, “hearers of the Word” as the theologian Karl Rahner wrote in an old but ever-present essay, in the silence of the heart one hears a voice, a word, the Word. Here other themes come into play, such as that of interiority and conscience, within which the Augustinian Pope moves perfectly at ease. Conscience according to another Jesuit theologian, the Irishman Michael Paul Gallagher, is the echo of a voice, that voice of God that calls us and questions us.

“But at the beginning there must be listening, listening in and from silence,” Monda added. “Warning: to listen it is better not to speak, to be silent.”

 

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Further information:

• Primum audire (L'Osservatore Romano)