Salve, cara mèi lettrici.  I interrupt this long silence to say we, my wife and I, are proceeding on our plans to reach Italy next year. Things are going well, while I plan to play tenor sax today in Decatur’s Fourth of July Parade.

We have rented out our furnished condo here. An economics professor from South Korea arrives Monday with his wife and 4-year-old child. He has a 13-month research fellowship at Georgia Tech. Perfect for us!

Perfect timing for us to leave the heavy quilt of July heat in the city for the cooler airs of a mountain lake 2,800 feet above sea level. We’ll be there for a peaceful summer and a beautiful fall, planning our move to Italy’s Adriatic coast for the winter and spring.

Our Blue Ridge lake is twice as high as Lake Albano, beside the Pope’s refuge an hour south of Rome at Castel Gandolfo. I can appreciate the escape that Leo XIV, our American “Bishop of Rome,” is making this weekend for that traditional summer retreat. Pope Francis, good Jesuit that he was, abstained from the 16^th century tradition of papal escape during his 12 years at the Vatican. In fact, Francis turned Castel Gandolfo into a museum for tourists.

But the Vatican still owns a villa overlooking the lake, and that’s where Leo XIV will be enjoying the cooler weather for the next two weeks.

Not that the Church’s work of faith, hope and charity is on vacation. Leo, taking the name of the Pope of Catholic social teaching from the age of the Robber Barons, is not backing off. A couple of weeks ago, he told legislators they should work “to overcome the unacceptable disproportion between the immense wealth concentrated in the hands of the few and the world’s poor.”

American Catholic bishops have also weighed in on the “Big” budget bill being signed by Trump today. They supported the few pieces aimed at the sanctity of human life. But all of the rest, they criticized. It worsens what Pope Leo called the “imbalance” between rich and poor that “generates situations of persistent injustice.” Not hearing the cry of the poor, the new Pope said, leads to violence and “sooner or later, to the tragedy of war.”

Seeking peace in the cool and beautiful mountains of North Georgia, we remember that the world below is still heating up and, God help us, out of balance.

Painting by Walter Cumming