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Pope Francis’ traditional World Day of Peace message 2025 (for the January 1 world day) has three specific requests.
This year’s World Day of Peace is particularly special within the Church because it is also the beginning of the ordinary Jubilee.
The beginning of the Holy Father’s message referred to the history and meaning of the jubilee, emphasizing the role of forgiveness and how we must remember that we are all debtors.
God owes nothing to anyone, yet he constantly bestows his grace and mercy upon all. As Isaac of Nineveh, a seventh-century Father of the Eastern Church, put it in one of his prayers: “Your love, Lord, is greater than my trespasses. The waves of the sea are nothing with respect to the multitude of my sins, but placed on a scale and weighed against your love, they vanish like a speck of dust”.
The Pope repeatedly calls for “disarming our hearts,” a phrase that he has used on other occasions, such as when praying the Rosary for Peace in October: “Rouse us from indifference which has darkened our way and disarm our hearts from weapons of violence.”
Earlier, in his invocation for peace in the Holy Land, he said: “There can be no peace if we do not let God himself first disarm our hearts, making them hospitable, compassionate and merciful.”
The World Day of Peace message has three concrete requests or suggestions, which Pope Francis places in continuity with his predecessors.
1
Forgiveness of debts
First, I renew the appeal launched by Saint John Paul II on the occasion of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 to consider “reducing substantially, if not cancelling outright, the international debt which seriously threatens the future of many nations”. [17] In recognition of their ecological debt, the more prosperous countries ought to feel called to do everything possible to forgive the debts of those countries that are in no condition to repay the amount they owe. Naturally, lest this prove merely an isolated act of charity that simply reboots the vicious cycle of financing and indebtedness, a new financial framework must be devised, leading to the creation of a global financial Charter based on solidarity and harmony between peoples.
2
Respect for life
I also ask for a firm commitment to respect for the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, so that each person can cherish his or her own life and all may look with hope to a future of prosperity and happiness for themselves and for their children. Without hope for the future, it becomes hard for the young to look forward to bringing new lives into the world. Here I would like once more to propose a concrete gesture that can help foster the culture of life, namely the elimination of the death penalty in all nations. This penalty not only compromises the inviolability of life but eliminates every human hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation. [18]
3
Hope for youth
In addition, following in the footsteps of Saint Paul VI and Benedict XVI, [19] I do not hesitate to make yet another appeal, for the sake of future generations. In this time marked by wars, let us use at least a fixed percentage of the money earmarked for armaments to establish a global Fund to eradicate hunger and facilitate in the poorer countries educational activities aimed at promoting sustainable development and combating climate change. [20] We need to work at eliminating every pretext that encourages young people to regard their future as hopeless or dominated by the thirst to avenge the blood of their dear ones. The future is a gift meant to enable us to go beyond past failures and to pave new paths of peace.
The Holy Father concludes the message with a prayer.
Prayer
Forgive us our trespasses, Lord,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
In this cycle of forgiveness, grant us your peace,
the peace that you alone can give
to those who let themselves be disarmed in heart,
to those who choose in hope to forgive the debts of their brothers and sisters,
to those who are unafraid to confess their debt to you,
and to those who do not close their ears to the cry of the poor.
And today we celebrate...