As 2025 draws to a close, it is tempting to summarise the year the way the world’s gatekeepers do: by counting victories, tracking markets, naming winners and losers, tallying territory gained and lost. It has been, in that sense, a year of headlines and hard edges—a year in which many people feel the ground shifting beneath their feet, and not in a good way.
Yet for Catholics, this year cannot be remembered without first speaking a name that shaped a generation of believers: Pope Francis. His death did not simply close a chapter; it felt, for many, like the loss of a familiar voice at the bedside of a wounded world. Whatever disagreements one had with him—and in the Church there are always disagreements—he insisted on keeping certain people in view: the poor, the migrant, the prisoner, the forgotten, the earth itself. He had the annoying, holy habit of returning our gaze to those whom ‘serious’ people prefer not to see.
And then, in the providence that so often confounds our timelines, came the election of Pope Leo XIV. A new Pope always arrives into a storm of hopes and projections. Some will treat him as a symbol to be claimed; others as a problem to be managed. But the deeper truth is simpler: the Chair of Peter is not a prize for the clever. It is a cross, lifted onto the shoulders of a man who must learn again—publicly, painfully—what it means to be a servant of servants in an age that worships the strong.
Outside the walls of the Vatican, the world’s vocabulary has grown harsher. We have watched Gaza and Ukraine with the dull ache of repeated tragedy, as if a human heart can only be stretched so many times before it begins to numb itself in self-defense. We have seen Sudan and other places that rarely trend, where suffering is no less real for being less photographed. We have heard talk of ‘security’ while ordinary families learn what it means to live without it: children startled by sirens, parents learning the new geometry of fear, the elderly counting medicines and prayers.
And over all this hangs a feeling that our world is becoming less safe and less secure not only because of bombs and bullets, but because of what is happening to the moral imagination. The global mood has turned transactional. Diplomacy is reduced to gifts, leverage, and lucrative deals. Truth is treated as a bargaining chip. Morality is defined by the powerful—and revised whenever it inconveniences them.
It is a deeply modern tragedy: a society so confident in itself that it cannot tolerate honest disagreement”
This year offered its own grim parable of that posture: an image of power in the Oval Office, the most photographed room on earth, where a murdered journalist’s name—Jamal Khashoggi—could be spoken of with a shrug, even a sneer, in the presence of the Saudi crown prince widely accused and condemned in connection with that killing. There are moments that reveal the soul of an era. This was one of them. Not because hypocrisy is new, but because shamelessness has become a kind of currency.
Aggressors are admired as ‘strong.’ The strong are indulged as ‘necessary.’ The weak are told to be ‘realistic.’ And somewhere along the way, many of us begin to speak as though peace is the reward of capitulation rather than the fruit of justice.
Even language itself is increasingly a battleground. Words once used to illuminate are now used to intimidate. In some places, people fear penalties for stating convictions about sex, gender, and the boundaries of private spaces—while in other places, vulnerable people fear being mocked, erased, or placed at risk. It is a deeply modern tragedy: a society so confident in itself that it cannot tolerate honest disagreement, and so unsure of itself that it must police speech to maintain the illusion of consensus. Fines, threats, and public shaming become substitutes for persuasion. And we all become poorer for it—less capable of listening, less willing to seek what is true, more ready to treat our neighbours as enemies.
In such a world, we are told—sometimes with contempt—that faith has no place. In one sense, the world is right.
Faith
Faith was never meant to be an accessory worn by the powerful at Christmas for a photograph. Faith was never meant to sanctify greed, baptize cruelty, or provide pious wallpaper behind exploitation. Faith was never ‘part’ of that world—not Herod’s world, not the High Priest’s world, not Pilate’s world. They understood power. They understood image-management. They understood what must be done to keep order. And when confronted by a man whose kingdom was not built on fear, they did what power does when it is challenged: they crushed him.
Jesus knew exactly what he was doing when he preached the Beatitudes. He did not offer a self-help slogan; he announced a revolution. Not a revolution of rifles and slogans, but a revolution of the heart—an unveiling of a kingdom that runs against every instinct of empire.
This is a manifesto of powerlessness. Which is precisely why it is dangerous.
And Jesus paid for that proclamation.
So here we are again, at the end of a year, approaching the feast that has always mocked the pretensions of the strong. The Prince of Peace is born not in a palace but in borrowed shelter, not surrounded by courtiers but by the poor, the overlooked, the ones who do not count. Heaven does not break into history at the centre of power; it breaks in at the margins.
The Christian response to 2025 is not denial. It is not escapism. It is not a sighing withdrawal that leaves the world to the wolves. It is, rather, a stubborn refusal to accept the world’s terms.
Holiness is what breaks the cycle: the cycle of humiliation and revenge, of domination and despair, of cynicism dressed up as sophistication”
If our age becomes transactional, the Church must become gratuitous again—generous without calculation.
If our age worships strength, the Church must remember the strength of the Cross.
If our age normalises cruelty, the Church must relearn tenderness as a form of moral courage.
If our age makes truth negotiable, the Church must speak truth with humility and without malice—never as a weapon, always as a light.
That is not a call to be ‘nice.’ The saints were not nice. It is a call to be holy. Holiness is what breaks the cycle: the cycle of humiliation and revenge, of domination and despair, of cynicism dressed up as sophistication. Holiness is what makes room for mercy in a culture that has forgotten how to forgive, and for justice in a world that has learned to live with outrage but not with conversion.
In 2025, the world has felt less safe. But the Gospel was never a promise that the world would be safe. It was a promise that God would be with us.
And that is not small comfort. It is the only comfort that lasts.
