The words used by Leo XIV during the Urbi et Orbi blessing on 25 December sketch a map of contemporary suffering: Gaza and Yemen, the Mediterranean crossed by migrants, young people looking for work, underpaid workers, prisoners forced to live in conditions that affront human dignity. The Pope names peoples and wounds as one would read names in a litany, because evil, when left abstract, becomes manageable. When we have the courage to give it a face, it demands a response.
The map the Pope draws holds together in a word that divides today: responsibility, understood as the grammar of peace rather than a moralising label. Leo XIV places it on the ridge where religion can shrink into consolation and politics can harden into cynicism, pointing to a passage that concerns conscience and, at the same time, the public sphere. He calls us to acknowledge our own failings, to ask forgiveness, to put ourselves in the place of those who suffer, and to build bonds of solidarity with those who carry the heaviest burden; from this movement emerges a conversion of heartcapable of shaping choices, priorities, language and interests.
The Pope puts at the centre a theological truth with social consequences: the Son of God is born without protection, meets rejection, embraces poverty, and chooses to take upon himself humanity’s sin. At Christmas, this trajectory is already complete. The story of the manger becomes a standard of judgement: where a society accepts that there is “room” for some and discard for others, the wound opens. Where a community builds spaces of welcome and instruments of justice, the wound begins to heal.
Saint Thomas More, in 1516, denounced the mechanisms that drive out the poor and then punish them. His image of “voracious” sheep that devour fields and homes describes a process: the concentration of wealth produces uprooting; uprooting produces misery; misery is turned into guilt. More, in Utopia, explained that power, when it becomes self-referential, needs to present its consequences as inevitability. The English Catholic statesman insisted on a point that becomes decisive again today: the law loses credibility when it punishes despair without addressing its causes. In denouncing the injustice of the death penalty for theft, he recalled the order of things: a human life carries a value that no economic calculation can match. He argued that dignity does not come from productivity; it comes from being sons. Leo XIV denounces this on Christmas Day as he addresses Rome and the whole world: a system that produces discards ends up defending itself by hardening, and hardening generates further fracture.
At the heart of the problem, and Saint Thomas More explains it very well, lies pride that measures prosperity against another’s hardship and turns the poor into an instrument: a useful presence for feeling superior, for dominating, for mocking. This diagnosis touches a raw nerve in the West: wellbeing that sanctifies itself, distance that becomes indifference, the habit of pushing suffering to the margins. Leo XIV, when he recalls the duty to “put ourselves in the shoes of those who suffer”, offers a spiritual and civic antidote: breaking the chain that starts with contempt and ends in violence, that starts with haste and ends in abandonment.
In the Message, peace takes shape through words with a concrete structure: forgiveness, dialogue, reconciliation, justice. The Pope quotes the prophet Isaiah: «Practising justice will bring peace». Everything is contained in that formula: peace requires institutions able to protect, economies able to include, and politics able to take the long view. It also requires consciences able to choose the good when it costs. Responsibility, then, becomes a discipline: learning to see the link between each person’s decisions and the wounds of many.
Within this horizon, the poetry of “wild peace” takes on particular weight. It speaks of a weariness that comes after excitement, when masks fall and the truth of things remains. The Pope frames it as an invocation rising from the earth. Those who live through wars and injustices know that weariness: they long for a peace that gets them back on their feet, that restores trust, that makes it possible to breathe. Christmas, Leo XIV has reminded us, offers this possibility because it places at the centre a Presence that enters fragility, passes through it, and transforms it from within.
The Jubilee of Hope is drawing to a close, the Holy Doors are closing, and the task remains open. Hope does not float above the ruins; it works within the ruins with patience. The Pope hints at this when he entrusts to the world a programme of conversion and responsibility. Saint Thomas More reminds us that justice begins when a society stops manufacturing the poor and starts recognising persons again. Between Bethlehem and our outskirts runs a precise line, demanding real choices. Peace grows where that line is respected, safeguarded, practised.
fr.L.V.
Silere non possum