Pope Francis’s homily on Wednesday — New Year’s Day, 2025 — was set in a Marian key and turned on the Marian title, “Mother of God,” celebrated on January 1st.

“In praying to Our Lady as the Mother of God,” Francis said, “we proclaim that Christ was begotten of the Father, yet also truly born of a woman.”

“The Apostle Paul sums up this mystery by telling us that ‘God sent forth his Son, born of a woman’ (Gal 4:4),” Pope Francis said. “Those words – ‘born of a woman’ – echo in our hearts today,” he said, “they remind us that Jesus, our Savior, became flesh and is revealed in the frailty of the flesh.”

Usually, one would not think the pope saying that Jesus is God would be terribly headline-worthy, but that’s what happened, and why it happened really is something worth exploring in light of two key concerns for the pope and for the Church, which his homily also brought into sharp focus: The Jubilee and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, both of which run through the year.

The motto of the Jubilee is “Pilgrims of Hope,” but the year coincides with the anniversary of the Council that gave us the Nicene Creed, and for that reason alone deserves a place on anyone’s short list of most important events in Church history.

Pope Francis hopes to use the anniversary for fostering relations with the Orthodox Church — a leitmotiv of his whole pontificate — but his homily on Wednesday also hinted at a desire to use the Jubilee Year for another purpose: To emphasize the reason the Council of Nicaea originally took place.

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The chief reason for the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 was a dispute between a priest-theologian called Arius and Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, over the nature of Jesus Christ.

Arius taught that since the Son comes from the Father, this means the Son is created, and not fully God. Athanasius countered that Christ was co-eternal and con-substantial with the Father, which is the common Christian belief.

It’s hard for us to imagine today, but the dispute between those two theological heavyweights burgeoned into a worldwide controversy that threatened to tear apart not only the Church but the Roman Empire in the fourth century.

The short version of a long and complex story is that the Council issued the Nicene Creed, which includes the passage saying Jesus is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Despite the declarations of the council, Arianism continued for decades under several guises. In his homily Wednesday, Francis quoted Saint Ambrose, who countered Arianism in Milan during his 374 to 397 reign as bishop.

“Mary is the door through which Christ entered this world,” Ambrose said, which the pope said is why she is the Mother of God.

Although he never used the word, “Arianism,” Francis strongly alluded to its ideas still lingering in the Church.

“There is a temptation, which many people today find attractive, but can also mislead many Christians, to imagine or invent a God ‘in the abstract’, associated with some vague religious feeling or fleeting emotion,” Francis said. “No,” Francis said, “God was ‘born of a woman’; he has a face and a name, and calls us to have a relationship with him.”

Pope Francis is not the only one noticing the phenomenon.

Writing earlier this year, Father Dwight Longenecker referred to this “temptation,” noting on his website that today, Arianism takes the guise of humanism.

“Arianism today is an interpretation of Christianity according to this materialistic, humanistic philosophy. Clearly, Jesus Christ as the Divine Son of God and the co-eternal second person of the Holy Trinity doesn’t really fit,” Longenecker wrote. “Instead Jesus is a good teacher, a wise rabbi, a beautiful example, a martyr for a noble cause,” he also wrote.

“At most,” Longenecker wrote, “[Jesus] is a human being who is ‘so fulfilled and self-actualized that he has ‘become divine’.’ To put it another way, ‘Jesus is so complete a human being that he reveals to us the divine image in which we were all created–and therefore shows us what God is like.’ There is a sense in which this ‘divinization’ happened to Jesus as a result of the graces he received from God, the life he led and the sufferings he endured.”

Nor is this “New Arianism” affecting only “liberal” Christians. These beliefs permeate many Christian denominations, including some of the more “conservative” groups within the broad fold of Christianity.

A 2022 survey of Evangelical Christians in the United States – some of the most “conservative” Christians in the country – found that 73 percent agreed with the statement that “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God,” and 43 percent agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”

In his homily on New Year’s Day, Pope Francis insisted belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ is central to Christian faith — again, a remarkable thing on which to insist precisely because, on paper at least, it should have been settled seventeen centuries ago.

“In the life of Jesus, we see that this is how God chooses to act: Through littleness and hiddenness. Jesus never yielded to the temptation of performing great signs and imposing himself on others, as the devil had suggested,” the pope said on Wednesday.

“Instead, he revealed God’s love in the beauty of his humanity, dwelling in our midst, sharing our daily life, our efforts and our dreams, being merciful to those suffering in body and spirit, giving sight to the blind and strength to the disheartened. By the frailty of his humanity and his concern for the weak and vulnerable, Jesus shows us the face of God,” Francis said.

It also happens that Jan. 2nd was the memorial of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, fourth century bishops who also opposed Arianism.

“The whole Church is sinking,” St. Basil once wrote to St. Athanasius, “like so many ships on the high seas, wandering about aimlessly, colliding one against the other under the violence of the waves.” St. Basil said the Church of his day was “a great shipwreck caused by the raging sea, and also by the disorder of the ships, one against the other, breaking up.”

“Where can we find a pilot who is up to the task, who is worthy enough in the faith to awaken the Lord, so that He may command the winds and the sea?” Basil asked.

Pope Francis may be preparing to use this year’s Jubilee to put firm hands on the helm and right the ship as she weathers this latest Arian storm.

Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome