By Saint Leo the Great | Foreword by Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Leo the Great was aptly named. A lion for Christ and His Church, he strove after greatness for the glory of God: instructing Christians in the mysteries of the faith; celebrating the liturgy, prayer, and fasting as central and living realities of the Christian life; chastising heretics and challenging pagans; caring for the poor and confronting barbarians—and all these efforts lovingly set in service to Christ, the Son of the living God. Yet the simplest and best example of Pope Leo’s greatness is surely his sermons, which clearly and splendidly articulate the saving message of the Gospel. 

This sampling of forty-eight sermons, freshly revised from Charles Lett Feltoe’s original 1895 translation, presents the wisdom of a great saint and successor to St. Peter in all its greatness, a servant of the servants of God truly devoted—in the words of Pope Benedict XVI—“to the service of truth in charity through an assiduous exercise of the Word,” unwaveringly committed to Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, who alone has the words of everlasting life.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, being at birth true man though He never ceased to be true God, made in Himself the beginning of a new creation, and in the form of His birth started the spiritual life of mankind afresh. (Saint Leo the Great)