“Peace be with you!” On 8 May 2025, Leo XIV delivered to the Church and to the world his first public words: not a slogan, but the words of Christ, taken up in their simplest and most demanding form, that of the blessing that flows from the Risen One. At the close of this year, we wish to give thanks to the Lord: we shall do so this evening before the Blessed Sacrament, with the particular grace of closing 2025 within a small particular Church in numerical terms - just over 145,000 faithful - yet called, precisely for this reason, to guard communion with greater responsibility, the peace of words and the truth of relationships.
We shall sing the Te Deum, and we shall do so because, in a time in which words have often become weapons, you have given us a Successor of Peter whom the Church needed infinitely. Te Deum laudamus because the Pope chose to inaugurate his pontificate with a word that disarms. He named a peace that does not coincide with a balance of forces nor with a fragile truce: “a disarmed and disarming peace, humble and persevering,” rooted in the love of God, offered even before it is negotiated. In this expression there is already a criterion by which to judge 2025: peace is not one theme among others; it is the test of the evangelical quality of our relationships and our choices.
Te Deum laudamus because that election - which took place at the heart of Easter time -placed back at the centre what is all too easily lost in ecclesial seasons marked by polarisation: the Church is not renewed by multiplying camps; it is renewed by returning to recognise and place at the centre the voice of the Risen Lord. Leo XIV said this to the Cardinals with a concreteness that allows no spiritualist alibis: God loves to communicate “in the whisper of a gentle breeze,” in that “still small voice of silence” that asks for listening rather than clamour. And from here too arises ecclesial responsibility: to educate the People of God not to confuse noise with truth, applause with discernment.
Te Deum laudamus because the unity that Leo XIV invokes and builds does not pass through the reduction of differences, but through their reconciliation within a greater belonging. He showed this by recalling “the true greatness of the Church,” which lives “in the variety of her members united to the one Head, Christ.” These are not abstract words but a genuine pastoral and political criterion, in the highest sense of the term. When communionbecomes a project of homogenisation, it produces fear and control; when it is lived as a body, it becomes mutual responsibility and freedom, because each serves the other without annulling him or her.
Te Deum laudamus because, in 2025, the magisterium of Leo XIV has indicated a concrete and practicable path to peace: it passes through the education of relationships and the custody of language. Even before proposing it to the world, the Pope entrusted it to the Church as an internal and urgent task: to learn to be reconciled, to stitch up fractures, to recognise one another as brothers and sisters within the same Body. It is an appeal that concerns everyone, clergy and faithful, because without this conversion of words and gazes, peace remains a topic and does not become a way of life. To the Italian Bishops he spoke of communities called to become “houses of peace,” places where hostility is defused through dialogue, where justice does not remain an idea and forgiveness is not a pious word. He then added a decisive point for those who work in information, for those who lead communities, for those who live in parishes and families: peace is a “humble path, made of daily gestures,” an interweaving of patience and courage, listening and action. There is no peace that does not pass through the discipline of the everyday.
Te Deum laudamus because the Pope has clearly demanded a true “custody” of words. Addressing the bishops, he indicated a demanding pastoral line: that ecclesial realities become places of intergenerational listening, capable of dialogue with different worlds, and at the same time environments in which care for words and relationships is practised. Leo XIV recalls to us a fact we often prefer to ignore: one can defend a position and at the same time wound communion; one can proclaim the truth and render it less credible by tone, insinuation, or the caricature of the other. For this reason, the Pope holds together credibility and communion, indicating an order that admits no shortcuts: “only where there is listening can communion be born, and only where there is communion does the truth become credible.”
Te Deum laudamus because the Pope has insisted that faith must not be used as an identity lexicon to divide. In the Message for World Youth Day, he wrote words that, in a year of polarisation, sound like an ecclesial examination of conscience: “Do not follow those who use the words of faith to divide.” And he indicated the opposite direction: to work to remove inequalities, to reconcile polarised communities, to transform the energy of young people into social responsibility and political charity. It is the very idea of mission in a time when fractures corrode the human even before institutions.
Te Deum laudamus because the invitation to unity, in 2025, did not remain a generic appeal. Leo XIV placed it within the concrete processes of the Church, asking that synodality become a mentality, that it enter hearts and ways of deciding. And in doing so, he chose an image of Saint Augustine that puts an end to many temptations of self-sufficiency: no member can say to another, “I have no need of you.” Unity, the Pope explains, is a grammar of the body: each remains himself, and precisely for this reason serves the other; each recognises limit, and precisely for this reason guards communion.
Te Deum laudamus because, at the end of the year, we can recognise that Christian gratitude does not arise from optimism, but from presence. Praise straightens the gaze: it recalibrates freedom and meaning within a time that makes us more fragile and exposed, and it brings us back to the essential, to the gratuitous permanence of a God who is near and who does not abandon history. This 2025 hands on to us a concrete articulation of this certainty. A Pope elected by the Sacred College by a large majority while the world raises its voice and the Church risks responding by instinct, chasing polarisation. Leo XIV, instead, has indicated another path: peace as a conversion of language, a healing of relationships, unity lived as a body and not as a sum of opposing parts.
Te Deum laudamus because 8 May 2025 did not mark only the beginning of a pontificate: it opened a journey that the Church is called to walk with determination. The peace of Christ - which the world invokes with urgency, often without knowing where to seek it - if taken seriously, becomes a criterion of verification: it weighs our words before our statements, our belongings before strategies, our capacity to listen before every claim. And for the year ahead it asks something extremely concrete: to become persons and communities in which peace can dwell without being tamed or reduced to a formula, because it is born from a source greater than ourselves and, precisely for this reason, can pass through our wounds without turning into propaganda.
Silere non possum