On the first Sunday after being named leader of the Catholic Church in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and addressed the tens of thousands of people gathered. Invoking tradition, he led the people in noontime prayer. But rather than reciting it, as his predecessors generally did, he sang.
In chanting the traditional Regina Caeli, the pope inspired what some have called a rebirth of Gregorian chant, a type of monophonic and unaccompanied singing done in Latin that dates back more than a thousand years.
