ROME – Pope Leo XIV closed the year 2025 condemning what he said were hypocritical and “armed” strategies that go against God’s plan of mercy for the world, pointing to the Virgin Mary’s humility as a source of hope.

Speaking to attendees of his Dec. 31 Vespers service for the vigil of the solemnity of the Mother of God on New Year’s Eve, the pope said the circumstances of Jesus’s incarnation point to “a design, a grand design for human history.”

It is “a mysterious plan, but with a clear center, like a high mountain illuminated by the sun in the midst of a dense forest: This center is the ‘fullness of time,’” he said.

“Sisters, brothers, in our time we feel the need of a wise, benevolent, and merciful design. May it be a free and liberating plan, peaceful, faithful,” and ultimately merciful, he said.

Leo lamented that there are other, contrary designs being drawn up in the world, which he described as “strategies aimed at conquering markets, territories and spheres of influence. Armed strategies, cloaked in hypocritical discourse, ideological proclamations, and false religious motives.”

Mary, who on New Year’s Day is celebrated in her role as the mother of God, shows the power of littleness, he said.

“She sees things with the eyes of God: she sees that with the power of his arm, the most high scatters the plots of the proud, overthrows the mighty from their thrones, and exalts the humble, fills the hands of the hungry with good things, and empties the rich,” he said.

Mary, Pope Leo said, is a woman with whom God “wrote the word that reveals the mystery.”

“He did not impose it: He proposed it first to her heart and, having received her ‘yes’, he wrote it with ineffable love in her flesh” with the incarnation of Christ, the pope said, saying that through this act, “God’s hope was intertwined with the hope of Mary.”

God, the pope said, “loves to hope through the little ones, and he does so by involving them in his plan of salvation. The more beautiful the plan, the greater the hope.”

The world, he said, continues to move forward driven by the hope of “so many simple people, unknown but not to God, who, despite everything, believe in a better tomorrow, because they know that the future is in the hands of the one who offers them the greatest hope.”

One of these people was Simon the fisherman, who Jesus would call and who would later be named Peter, history’s first pope.

“God the Father gave him such a sincere and generous faith that the Lord was able to build his community on it,” Leo said, noting that countless pilgrims came to pray at Peter’s tomb during the Jubilee of Hope, which will close Jan. 6 on the feast of the Epiphany.

The jubilee year that is about to end is a powerful sign “for a new, renewed, and reconciled world according to God’s design,” he said.

This design, he said, reserves a special place for the city of Rome, “not for its glories, not for its power, but because here Peter and Paul, and so many other martyrs shed their blood for Christ.”

“For this reason Rome is the city of the jubilee,” he said, voicing hope that Rome would always “be at the height of its little ones. Of the children, of the elderly who are lonely and fragile, of the families who struggle to get by, of men and women who came from far away hoping for a dignified life.”

Pope Leo thanked God for the gift of the jubilee and for the graces received, saying the holy year was “a great sign of his design of hope for mankind and for the world.”

He also thanked all those who assisted the pilgrims that traveled to Rome for the jubilee year, saying Pope Francis’s wish in opening the jubilee last year was for all who came to encounter God’s hope.

“I wish it were still so, and I would say even more so after this time of grace. May this city, animated by Christian hope, be at the service of God’s loving design for humanity,” he said, asking that Rome’s famed Marian devotion, Maria Salus Populi Romani, intercede for this intention.

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