The global media machine has, true to form, churned differences of belief between Pope Leo and U.S. President Donald Trump into a war of words regarding the conflict with Iran.

Typically, too, Trump has used his look-over-there technique to divert attention from the breakdown of his cease-fire talks. (Vegas should give odds on how many more times journalists, pundits and politicos will fall for America’s leader using his Truth Social platform to focus attention on his incendiary antics and away from real world concerns.)

Catholics might feel gratified that media opinion-shaping has come down on the side of the Pontif’s calls for peace in the war-torn Holy Land. Such appreciation must be tempered by awareness of how quickly those hypocrites will turn on Pope Leo when next he upholds Church teaching on, say, same-sex relations, the culture of death, or related holy of holies secular dogma.

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The temptation might be strong to ignore the whole sordid shebang but that’s not really a full answer, either. We are called, after all, to be in the world though not of it. Perhaps a more effective answer is provided in the example of a particular story in this issue of The Catholic Register.

While media puppeteers make the sky gods rage in the dark clouds above our heads, we report that Young Professional Catholics of Toronto, their feet firmly on the ground and Christ in their hearts, managed to hold seven sold-out events in 2025 that have reached more than 2,500 souls since the group’s founding. 

The number will surely grow after an April 16 panel discussion on Integrity at Work. Outreach is up from, oh, almost zero when YPCT held its first, tentative networking nights only a short while ago. 

It is evangelization as concrete, practical action. It is Catholic faith, Catholic life, made manifest. And BTW, it puts to the sword the odious media myth that being Catholic means being obsessed with some unhinged thing some transient politician said to the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

No. Being Catholic, as YPCT co-founder and vice-president Kateryna Shpir told our man Luke Mandato, is about taking Christ and the Holy Spirit out of the doors of our churches after Mass and living them in the realities of our daily lives.

“Even taking a moment at noon to pray the Angelus helps bring back a new breath into what we are doing, being very conscious about what motivates us during the day and allowing space for God in that moment,” Shpir said.

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It’s in her citation of motivation that the YPCT story becomes so exemplary. The April 16 event reveals a roster of fellow Catholics and their related organizations equally committed to evangelizing in their respective ways. The short list bears reprinting in point form:

·      Dr. Miles Smit, co-director of Petrarch Institute, active with Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice and Catholic Conscience, and board member of Mary Mother of God School. 

·      Dr. Althea Burrell, a sleep medicine physician.

·      Matthew Marquardt, executive director and founder of Catholic Conscience.

·       Dr. Christian Domenic Elia, associate dean of undergraduate studies at Ontario Tech University’s Frazer Faculty of Education and executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League.

Four people across a wide range of fields and interests, all active within their own organizations and lives, carrying the Faith with them out the church door and into the life of their city, their Canada, their world. They are, of course, but a titch of a smidgin of a drop in the bucket of the tens – hundreds – of thousands of Catholics who daily do likewise for Our Lord’s sake. 

This is the glory of our Holy Mother Church. This is the reality of the Church. From Her miraculous inception following Christ’s time on earth, His death and Resurrection, She has faced debates, divisions, conflicts, threats ephemeral and dire. Barrages of verbiage far more devastating than anything the Dyed Blonde Delusionist in the White House could imagine have assailed her. 

Yet the faithful stand with Her and proceed from Her, carrying out Jesus’ commandments to love God and neighbour, to go out in the world and bring the Gospel to all peoples not just in their words but in how they carry themselves in His name. 

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The words of the world, the jibes, the insults, the detractions, the two-faced hypocrisies and even blasphemies pass away. But His words do not. And it is to them, and those who carry them, that we should turn our eyes.