On Wednesday, I had a pretty incredible experience. I went to the Vatican for an event at St. Peter’s Square that’s held every Wednesday when the Pope holds a general audience.

It’s an amazing event. There are tens of thousands of people — divided by country of origin — who gather in St. Peter’s Square from all over the world. It’s a reminder that godly, Biblical values are the guiding force for billions of people around the world. The world seems like a very dark place from time to time, but the reality is that if you stick to eternal values, it does make the world a brighter place.

The Pope came in his vehicle, drove around, greeted the entire audience, and then he came up in the center of St. Peter’s Square, right in front of the basilica, and gave an address about the Bible which was read out loud in a variety of different languages.

I got to sit up there near where the Pope was. What the Pope said was quite beautiful. He quoted from the Book of John, the story about the Pool of Bethesda, in which Jesus goes to the Pool of Bethesda, where there are people who are ill and people who are paralyzed. There’s a man there who’s been sick and infirm for 38 years. And Jesus goes to that man and he tells him that he ought to get up, take his mat with him, and walk.

And the Pope said we should all reflect on Jesus’ statement. At that moment when we feel stuck and trapped in a dead end, instead of allowing that to become an excuse for others to take care of us, we should not allow this to become a justification to avoid making decisions about our lives. Instead, we should get away from fatalism and embrace personal responsibility.

It is these kinds of messages that are implicit in the Biblical narrative that the Pope is spreading, and that is a wonderful thing for our civilization.

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I’ve talked about this before — I’m an Orthodox Jew. Obviously. I don’t have a dog in the fight when it comes to internal battles over doctrine in Catholicism, except to the extent that the Catholic Church remains a lodestone for Western civilization, a great spreader of Biblical values to humanity.

In the same way, there are Protestant churches that do the same. People of God, people of the book, people of the Bible are spreading eternal values. It is worth acknowledging that and honoring that.

That’s actually what I said to the Pope when I had an opportunity to meet him. I handed him a letter asking for an interview and introduced myself. You’re supposed to bring the Pope a gift.

I explained who I was. (Obviously, he has a lot of things to do, so I doubt he’s a regular listener to my show.) At this point, I explained to him that I was there to pay honor to the fact that he was representative of biblical values in the world. Then I added, “I happen to have been a devout White Sox fan since the time I was a child.”

Of course, Pope Leo is a White Sox fan. He recently spoke at Comiskey Park via video to some 30,000 people.

I told him that while he is Catholic and I am Jewish, one of the miracles that we can agree on is the 2005 White Sox winning the World Series. I brought with me from my personal collection a 2005 World Series White Sox baseball signed by the entire team, and gave it to him.

He seemed a little bit surprised, not by the fact that I was giving a gift, but because it was a gift and not just me showing him something cool, I suppose. You could see him crack a bit of a smile as he received it. He was pretty delighted by it.

So it was really a terrific experience. Honestly, the entire event was amazing.

It was an honor to meet His Holiness, @Pontifex in Vatican City today, and to thank him for standing up for Biblical values in a chaotic world…and to present him with a signed 2005 White Sox World Series baseball I had in my collection (we’re both fans). pic.twitter.com/hxlhUnKU7F

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 18, 2025

My impression of him is that Pope Leo seems to be a man who has enmeshed himself in the office. And when you meet the Pope, you can see he’s a deeply humble man. You can tell that right away just from meeting him. And you could see the sheer joy that he had, I think, from getting the baseball, which is such a small thing for this man who has the weight of the spiritual fate of over a billion people on his shoulders.

I share that because there are a lot of moments in the political world that are not uplifting. There are a lot of moments that are fraught, that feel as though darkness is encroaching.

And so, there needs to be a meeting of the minds between all of us who believe in Biblical values, and that those Biblical values ought to be purveyed. It’s one of the reasons why I have encouraged people who are Catholic to go to church, people who are Protestant to go to church, and Jews to go to synagogue and relearn their traditions and engage with those traditions.

I’m very much in favor of the strengthening of the Catholic Church and the strengthening of Protestant churches all over the United States and the rest of the West.

I’m very much in favor of people reengaging with the values that made the West what it was in the first place.