Top photo caption: Prelates applaud as Pope Leo XIV meets with members of the Focolare Movement during a private audience at the Vatican Sept. 9, 2026. In his remarks, the Pope underlined the urgent need “to give witness to both the sense and service of unity” in an age “sadly marked by increasing polarization.” OSV News photo/Simone Risoluti, Vatican Media
By Courtney Mares, OSV News
VATICAN CITY OSV News — Pope Leo XIV explained why “giving witness to unity” is something close to his heart in a Sept. 9 audience with bishops associated with the Focolare movement.
The Pope, whose motto is “In the One, we are one,” underlined the urgent need “to give witness to both the sense and service of unity” in an age “sadly marked by increasing polarization.”
The answer to the divisions that plague our world, he said, lies “not in forming more committees or launching more projects, but in going back to the source of our unity in the Holy Trinity.”
The once-stable networks of family, friends and community in the West are now giving way to “to greater fragmentation … where freedom is increasingly presented as absolute autonomy,” he explained, detached from moral or natural human limits.
Yet, he noted, “for all the emphasis on individual freedom, people today frequently feel less free to be their genuine selves or follow their highest ideals, out of a hidden fear of being judged or of not fitting in.”
The source of true unity is the Holy Trinity, Pope Leo emphasized, explaining that disunity “deprives us of the happiness for which we were created, since we are made in the image of the Triune God, who is himself a communion of persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
“In revealing the heart of the Father, Christ shows us the deepest meaning of our existence, of our relationships, and the path to happiness,” the Pope said.
Pope Leo called the Church “a mystery of communion” and “sign and leaven of unity for our world.”
“Through the gift of the Spirit, we have become children of God, sharers in the divine life, and from this communion with God flows our communion with one another as brothers and sisters in Christ,” he said.
Pope Leo pointed to Servant of God Chiara Lubich, who founded the Focolare movement in Italy in 1943 and made “giving witness to unity” an essential element of the movement inspired by Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel of John, “May they all be one.”
The Focolare movement, whose official name is the “Work of Mary,” has grown to have more than 2 million people in 183 countries who participate in the life of the movement and its “spirituality of unity.”
Among those present at the papal audience were South Korean Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Clergy, who has long been associated with the movement, and Margaret Karram, who has served as its president since 2021.
“As sharers in the spiritual legacy of Chiara Lubich, and as ministers of Christ’s Church in a fragmented world, you are called to give witness to this longed-for unity of the human family,” he told the bishops who are gathered in Rome as “friends of the Focolare Movement.”
“I hope you will take the opportunity to nourish your interior life: with generous and sustained prayer before our Lord in the Tabernacle, with a calm and attentive celebration of the Office and Holy Mass, and finally by frequent contemplation of the indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity in the depth of our being,” he said. ” In this way, you will be witnesses to each other and to those you serve of that unity which builds lasting peace.”
Courtney Mares is Vatican editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @catholicourtney.
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