Pope Leo: Jubilee Year ‘a powerful sign of a new world’

On Wednesday, 31 December, the last day of the year, Pope Leo XIV presided over the First Vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, his final celebration of 2025.

In St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, with roughly 5,500 of the faithful in attendance, the Pope said that the evening’s liturgy possesses “a singular richness that flows both from the awe-inspiring mystery it celebrates and from its place at the end of the civil year.”

“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” This biblical passage from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, read out during the vespers, was at the centre of Pope Leo’s homily.

The Pope said that this way of presenting the mystery of Christ “calls to mind a great plan for human history—a mysterious plan, but one with a clear center, like a high mountain lit by the sun in the midst of a dense forest: the ‘fullness of time.’”

Today, in a society weighed down by the burden of sin, we keenly feel “the need for a wise, benevolent, merciful plan”, the Pope said.

However, he warned, there are other plans at work in the world: “strategies aimed at conquering markets, territories, and spheres of influence; armed strategies, concealed beneath hypocritical rhetoric, ideological proclamations, and false religious motives.