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VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The tenacious hope of people of faith, believing in a better tomorrow, keeps God's plan of salvation alive in the world, Pope Leo XIV said. 

They keep hope alive even though today, just like in the past, there are other kinds of plans unfolding, he said during an evening prayer service in St. Peter's Basilica Dec. 31. 

They include plans "aimed at conquering markets, territories and zones of influence. Weaponized strategies, cloaked in hypocritical speeches, ideological proclamations and false religious motives," he said. 

The pope, accompanied by dozens of cardinals and bishops, and thousands of visitors in the basilica, prayed vespers and then sang the "Te Deum" ("We praise you, oh God") in thanksgiving for the blessings of the past year. 

The prayer service was held less than a week before the official close of the Holy Year 2025, which was inaugurated by Pope Francis when he opened the Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica during Christmas Eve Mass in 2024. Pope Leo was scheduled to close the door Jan. 6, the feast of the Epiphany, thereby officially marking the end of the Holy Year. 

"Let us thank God for the gift of the Jubilee, which has been a great sign of (God's) plan of hope for humanity and the world," Pope Leo said in his homily. 

In this plan, God has "reserved a special place for this city of Rome," he said. "Not because of its glories, not because of its power, but because Peter and Paul and so many other martyrs shed their blood here for Christ." 

"That is why Rome is the city of the Jubilee," he told the congregation, which included Rome's mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, who was seated in the front row. 

The birth of the Son of God "suggests a plan, a great plan for human history," the pope said, which will "sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth." 

"Sisters, brothers, today we feel the need for a wise, benevolent, merciful plan," he said. "May it be a free and liberating, peaceful, faithful plan, like the one the Virgin Mary proclaimed in her canticle of praise: 'His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him.'" 

"The Holy Mother of God, the smallest and highest among creatures, sees things through the eyes of God: she sees that with the might of his arm, the Most High disperses the plots of the arrogant, overthrows the powerful from their thrones and raises up the lowly, fills the hands of the hungry with good things and empties those of the rich," he said. 

"God loves to hope with the heart of the least" and the meek, he said, "and he does so by involving them in his plan of salvation." 

"The more beautiful the plan, the greater the hope," he said. "And indeed, the world goes on like this, driven by the hope of so many simple people, unknown but not to God, who, despite everything, believe in a better tomorrow, because they know that the future is in the hands of the One who offers them the greatest hope." 

After the service, Pope Leo visited the Vatican Nativity scene in St. Peter's Square and prayed at the creche while the band of the Swiss Guard played Christmas carols. He then greeted the faithful gathered there, exchanging small talk and wishing people a happy new year. 

At least 46 Catholic churches in Germany were deconsecrated in 2025, a German newspaper reported.

Citing data from the bishops’ conference, the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung also reported that at least 66 Catholic churches in Germany were deconsecrated the previous year.

Twenty-three churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the nation’s leading Protestant body, were relegated to profane use in 2022, the most recent year for which EKD data are available.

Ozarks First, the digital news platform of two television stations in Springfield, Missouri, examined the history of The Menace, a Missouri-based anti-Catholic weekly newspaper founded in 1911.

“By September 1913, circulation surpassed 1 million,” Kathryn Skopec wrote in her article, published yesterday. “In comparison, the New York World reported 383,000, the Chicago American 363,000 and the New York Times 250,000.”

Skopec reported that “from 1917 to 1919, internal disputes and America’s entry into World War I deepened the Menace’s decline.” The newspaper’s offices, based in the town of Aurora, were destroyed in a 1919 fire.

The National Commission for Justice and Peace, a lay body within the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, lamented the domestic, regional, and international rise in military spending.

“An unprecedented increase is expected for our country and for the other members of the European Union,” the commission stated on December 29. “This union of states born as an alternative to a past of continuous wars seems to prepare for the inevitability of war. And it does so through deterrence.”

“There are alternatives that serve to build this authentic peace, which certainly does not rest on surrender to injustice,” the commission continued. “This authentic peace is built by the implementation of international law, cooperation between states, the development of peoples, [and] regime changes by peaceful means (changes that recent history also records).”

Armed bandits broke into a Nigerian parish residence at 2:30 AM yesterday and attacked two priests, the Lagos-based Vanguard reported. One of the priests, Father Chris Pever, underwent surgery after suffering an arm fracture.

The attack took place in Mararaba, a town in Nasarawa State.

A Latin-rite bishop in Ukraine criticized the Trump administration’s position on the Russo-Ukrainian war.

“I remember how we listened to the Voice of America radio station when I was a child under Soviet rule, and always knew it presented the truth, standing up for human rights and suffering people,” Bishop Stanislav Szyrokoradiuk, OFM, of Odesa-Simferopol said in an interview with OSV News. “To hear this same voice today defending the evildoer and demanding we reward him for his crimes is deeply shocking and hurtful. Yet we know this isn’t the true voice of Americans.”

Bishop Szyrokoradiuk said that those “who’ve taken power” in the US aren’t “interested in truth and justice.”

“Wickedness should be punished—to ensure its perpetrators no longer steal and kill,” the prelate added. “How can we trust people to defend us and uphold our rights when they’re clearly pursuing quite different interests of their own and are ready to do business with criminals? In the end, we can only pray for their conversion.”

The secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization strongly criticized the Nigerian government for its inability to protect Christians and called on Muslims to “denounce and reject the use of their religion to commit acts of violence.”

In an interview with the Fides News Agency, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, a native of Nigeria, said that “numerous indications suggest that there are groups determined to systematically attack Christian communities”—a far different assessment from that of Nigerian Archbishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, who recently dismissed claims of persecution there.

Archbishop Nwachukwu also suggested that the recent US strikes in Nigeria might be justified. Asked to comment on whether the strikes were “appropriate and viable,” he said:

A country can find itself unable to cope with its own crises and divisions without external help. I see many Muslim friends who do not know how to react to what is happening, and the government’s inaction is evident. In this situation, external intervention, even indirect, to support the state and the government against extremist groups and help the country eliminate the causes of widespread violence, might not be entirely unjustified or out of place.