Pope Leo XIV

ZURICH — A priest from a Catholic splinter sect that was excommunicated ‌earlier this week told worshippers on Sunday that the breakaway group would be welcomed back to the Church under a different pope.

Pope Leo marked the 250th anniversary of U.S. ​independence on Saturday with an appeal to Americans to welcome and protect immigrants, in a letter sent to his home country as he visited ‌Italy’s migrant frontline island of Lampedusa.

Pope Leo XIV begged a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics to call off its plan to consecrate new bishops without his consent, calling the move a schismatic act and a “sin of extreme gravity.”

It took a little over a year for Pope Leo XIV to write more than 42,000 words of his first encyclical, which deals with the safeguarding of human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the role the Holy See itself played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Pope Leo XIV on Saturday greeted families who lost loved ones to illegal toxic dumping tied to a multi-billion criminal racket in an area near Naples.