Pope Leo: Repent Sins, Bear Witness, Foster Christian Unity, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, Nov 25, 2025

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

In the new Apostolic Letter In Unitate Fidei it is a pleasure to see Pope Leo doubling down on the importance of Christian unity precisely by not watering down the Catholic Faith, but rather by insisting on the absolute truth of the fundamental Catholic creed set forth by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. One of the primary purposes of that Creed was to deny the Arian view that Christ was not eternal like the Father, but somehow “made” by the Father at some point before the creation of the world. Attributed to a Christian presbyter named Arius, this understanding was one of a great many distortions of the person of Christ which arose in the first centuries of Christianity, and which the Church found it necessary to correct.

Sadly, of course, other sorts of distortions have continued to arise throughout history, leading groups of Christians to break with the Church founded by Jesus Christ in favor of their own interpretations of Divine Revelation. Clearly we are plagued by the same problem today, but disagreements over the nature(s) and personhood of Jesus Christ were, perhaps for obvious reasons, among the most heated controversies in the first few centuries of the Christian era. Thus, Pope Leo has taken advantage of the 1700th anniversary of the great Council of Nicaea, which definitively corrected the mistaken assumption that Christ was not “true God from true God” but rather a lesser being who served as the intermediary between us and our inaccessible Father. …

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