Pope Francis opened 2025 at St. Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday with a plea to protect life at every stage and a Jubilee-year challenge to the world’s wealthier nations: forgive the debts of the poorest countries, as a matter of justice rather than charity.
Celebrating Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God — which the Catholic Church also marks as the World Day of Peace — the 88-year-old pope said he hoped the new year would be consecrated to peace, and urged “a firm commitment to respect for the dignity of human life, from conception to natural death,” so that every person “may cherish his or her own life and everyone may look with hope to the future.” In his homily he listed whose lives demand that respect: life in the womb and the lives of children, the suffering, the poor, the elderly, the lonely and the dying.
Key Points
- The pope appealed to leaders of countries with Christian traditions to cancel or substantially reduce the debts of poorer nations during the 2025 Jubilee.
- His written World Day of Peace message also proposed abolishing the death penalty and diverting a fixed share of military spending to a global fund against hunger, poverty and climate change.
- Pope Francis opened a Holy Year expected to draw tens of millions of pilgrims to Rome.
Pope Francis at the Angelus: an appeal aimed at creditors
At the midday Angelus, Francis made the debt appeal explicit, asking heads of state and government of countries of Christian tradition to set a good example by cancelling or significantly reducing what poorer nations owe. He framed it as reciprocity: no country or people, he said, should be crushed by debt — an “ecological debt” owed by the global North to the South, a theme he has pressed since his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’.
The written message for the 58th World Day of Peace, titled “Forgive us our trespasses: grant us your peace,” goes further, calling debt forgiveness a matter of justice because the richest countries built prosperity partly on resources drawn from the poorest. It asks the international community to guarantee access to food, water and education to indebted nations, and to end the death penalty everywhere. Vatican officials admit enforcement is beyond the Church’s power; the argument is moral pressure, timed to a Jubilee — a tradition, rooted in the Hebrew Bible, of periodically wiping debts clean.
Background: a Holy Year under way
Pope Francis opened the Holy Year on Christmas Eve by pushing open the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, launching a year of pilgrimage, confession and indulgences that Rome expects to draw some 32 million visitors. Debt relief is the Jubilee’s signature social demand, reviving the spirit of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which helped win real debt cancellation for heavily indebted poor countries.
The political headwinds are obvious: military spending is rising across Europe and the United States, and aid budgets are under strain. The pope’s New Year package — life issues on which he agrees with conservatives, economic demands that challenge them — is characteristic of a pontificate that resists being filed under any single party’s platform.
What happens next
The address proved, in hindsight, to be the last New Year message of Pope Francis: he died on April 21, 2025, after months of declining health, and the Jubilee he opened continued under the cardinals’ and then his successor’s care. The debt campaign he launched passed to Catholic aid networks and sympathetic governments — with the measure of its success to be read, as he would have insisted, not in communiqués but in budgets.
The Holy Year machinery around him was already turning. Rome spent 2024 repaving squares and bracing its transport system for the pilgrim influx, and in the days after Christmas the Holy Doors of the city’s other major basilicas were opened in sequence, so that the Jubilee indulgence — the spiritual heart of the pilgrimage — could be gained across the city. Francis, who has used a wheelchair in recent years and paced his schedule through a demanding Christmas season, kept the New Year rites comparatively spare. The Jubilee’s social theme, however, was not spare at all: the Vatican intends the pilgrims’ Rome to hear as much about debts and ledgers as about liturgy in the year ahead.
Sources: Vatican — Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and Angelus address, Jan. 1, 2025; Message for the 58th World Day of Peace, “Forgive us our trespasses: grant us your peace.”
