Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass on Christmas Day at 10:00 a.m. Rome time in St. Peter’s Basilica, becoming the first pope to preside over the Christmas Day Mass since St. John Paul II more than thirty years ago. He used the occasion to deliver a forceful meditation on peace as a gift born from vulnerability rather than power.
Opening his homily with the prophet Isaiah, the Pope invited the faithful to contemplate peace emerging amid devastation and rebuilding. “‘Break forth together into songs of joy,’ cries the messenger of peace to those standing amid the ruins of a city in desperate need of rebuilding,” he said. “Though dusty and wounded, his feet are beautiful… because, along rugged and weary roads they have carried a glad announcement in which everything is reborn.”
“A new day has dawned,” Pope Leo declared. “We too are part of this new beginning, even if few as yet believe it: peace is real, and it is already among us.”
“Today, therefore, we are not only surprised by the peace that is already here; we also celebrate the way in which this gift has been given to us,” the pope said. “In this ‘how,’ in fact, shines the divine difference that causes us to break forth into songs of joy.”
Reflecting on the Prologue of John’s Gospel, the Pontiff emphasized the paradox at the heart of Christmas: “The ‘Word’ is a word that acts… yet here is the surprise that the Christmas liturgy presents to us: the Word of God appears but cannot speak,” he said. “He comes to us as a newborn baby who can only cry and babble. ‘The Word became flesh.’”
That flesh, Pope Leo stressed, signifies exposed vulnerability. “‘Flesh’ is the radical nakedness that, in Bethlehem as in Calvary, remains even without words,” he said. “Human flesh asks for care; it pleads for welcome and recognition; it seeks hands capable of tenderness and minds willing to listen.”
“This is the paradoxical way in which peace is already among us,” Pope Leo explained. “God surprises us because he leaves himself open to rejection. He also captivates us because he draws us away from indifference.”
In his homily, Pope Leo also addressed contemporary suffering with unusual directness. “Since the Word was made flesh, humanity now speaks, crying out with God’s own desire to encounter us,” he said. “How, then, can we not think of the tents in Gaza… or of those of so many other refugees and displaced persons on every continent; or of the makeshift shelters of thousands of homeless people in our own cities?”
“Fragile is the flesh of defenseless populations, tried by so many wars,” he continued. “Fragile are the minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms… feeling the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths.”
Peace, Pope Leo insisted, begins precisely there. “When the fragility of others penetrates our hearts… then peace has already begun,” he said. “The peace of God is born from a newborn’s cry that is welcomed, from weeping that is heard.”
Invoking the Virgin Mary as the model of the Church, Pope Leo concluded: “In Her, we understand that nothing is born from the display of force, and everything is reborn from the silent power of life welcomed.”
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