During his traditional Christmas blessing for the city and the world on Sunday, December 25, Pope Francis called for an “immediate” end to the war in Ukraine. “Unfortunately, people prefer to listen to other arguments dictated by the logic of the world,” he lamented.
The specter of war in Ukraine hung over the Pope’s Christmas blessing “urbi et orbi” (to the city and the world) in Rome on Sunday 25 December. As airstrikes rang out in Kyiv and other cities across the country, the Pope, from the famous window of St. Peter’s Basilica, made a deeply concerned appeal for peace while “the winds of war continue to blow coldly on humanity.”
The first scenario of the current “Third World War”, according to Pope Francis, would be Ukraine. For this country, about which he has spoken more than a hundred times since the beginning of the war, the Pope prayed to Jesus, the “Prince of Peace” to “enlighten the minds of those who have the power to silence the guns and immediately to end this senseless war!” It was a call whose limitations he understood almost immediately, as his own previous calls for a truce or truce, such as at Christmas, always fell on deaf ears.
“Who hears the child’s voice?”
“Unfortunately, we prefer to listen to other arguments dictated by the logic of the world. But who listens to the voice of the child?” he asked, referring to the baby Jesus whose birth Christians celebrate on December 25.
“Jesus himself is our peace,” the pope said. Contrasting human logic geared toward destruction and war with divine logic, Francis insisted that Jesus “opened the way from a closed world oppressed by the darkness of enmity and war to an open world that… is free to live in brotherhood and peace”.
“Entire populations at risk of starvation”
“May our eyes be filled with the faces of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters who are living in the dark, in the cold or far from their homes this Christmas because of the destruction caused by ten months of war,” Francis implored.
“The war in Ukraine has further aggravated the situation and threatens entire populations with starvation,” Francis worried in front of the 70,000 people present in St. Peter’s Square. “Every war, as we know, causes hunger and uses the food itself as a weapon to prevent its distribution to the already suffering population,” added the Pope.
But for the first time since the unrest in Iran began, he also explicitly mentioned that country. An unusual event since the beginning of his pontificate. Francis prayed for “reconciliation in Burma and Iran” where, he added, “all bloodshed must stop.”
Among the other countries affected by this piecemeal global war that he so often denounces, the Pope named Syria, but also the Holy Land, Lebanon and the Sahel. As in 2021, he called for a “permanent ceasefire” in Yemen and “reconciliation” for Burma. He also mentioned Haiti, whose people, the Pope stressed, “have been suffering for so long”. It was a conclusion to the world tour of a war-torn humanity to which the Pope appeared on Sunday December 25 as a tireless messenger of peace.