Pope Leo, in year-end homily, reflects on the Virgin Mary’s role in God’s plan

December 31, 2025

Pope Leo XIV presided at Vespers in St. Peter’s Basilica this evening and, in his last homily of the year, reflected on the Blessed Virgin Mary’s role in God’s plan (booklet, video).

The First Vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God “is of a singular richness, which derives both from the dizzying mystery it celebrates and from its location at the very end of the solar year,” Pope Leo preached. God’s plan, he said, is a “mysterious design but with a clear center, like a high mountain illuminated by the sun in the middle of a dense forest: this center is the ‘fullness of time.’“

“Sisters, brothers, in our time we feel the need for a wise, benevolent and merciful plan,” the Pope continued. “May it be a free and liberating, peaceful, faithful project, like the one that the Virgin Mary proclaimed in her canticle of praise.”

Pope Leo warned that “other designs, however, today as in the past, envelop the world. Rather, they are strategies, which aim to conquer markets, territories, areas of influence. Armed strategies, cloaked in hypocritical speeches, ideological proclamations, false religious motives.”

Reflecting on the Virgin Mary and God’s plan of salvation, Pope Leo said:

But the Holy Mother of God, the smallest and highest of creatures, sees things with God’s gaze ... The Mother of Jesus is the woman with whom God, in the fullness of time, wrote the Word that reveals the mystery. He did not impose it: he first proposed it to her heart and, having received her “yes”, he wrote it with ineffable love in her flesh.

Thus the hope of God was intertwined with the hope of Mary, descendant of Abraham according to the flesh and above all according to faith. God loves to hope with the hearts of the little ones, and he does so by involving them in his plan of salvation.

At the conclusion of his homily, Pope Leo spoke about the 2025 Jubilee year and the city of Rome.

“The Jubilee is a great sign of a new world, renewed and reconciled according to God’s plan,” he preached. “And in this plan, Providence has reserved a special place for this city of Rome. Not for its glories, not for its power, but because Peter and Paul and so many other martyrs shed their blood for Christ here. This is why Rome is the city of the Jubilee.”

Following the celebration of Vespers, the Te Deum was chanted in thanksgiving for the blessings of the past year.

 

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Further information:

• Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God - First Vespers and Te Deum in Thanksgiving for the past Year (Dicastery for Communication - Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 12/31/25)