From one of Baltimore’s most iconic landmarks, the Eucharist was lifted in prayer over the city as part of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage.

As Catholics from around the world gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the sixth World Apostolic Congress on Mercy, Pope Leo XIV said the world’s growing need for peace cannot be separated from mercy, urging believers to become witnesses of God’s compassion in a time marked by war, violence and uncertainty.

With the theme, “One Nation Under God,” the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage arrived in the Archdiocese of Baltimore June 9 at the site of the nation’s first monument to George Washington – a stoic stone tower just off the Appalachian Trail in Middletown.

Amid the loneliness and despair of life behind bars, God continues to love and encourage the imprisoned to not let the sorrows of their past deter them from the hope of a better future, Pope Leo XIV told prisoners in Barcelona.

The U.S. bishops in a message to Pope Leo XIV June 10 thanked him for his new encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” and for shining “the light of the Gospel and the tradition of the Church on the new opportunities and challenges posed by the rise” of artificial intelligence and “emerging technologies.”