Pray with the Pope Reflection - December 2025

Fr. Edmund Lo, SJ

Friday, December 5, 2025

My brothers and sisters: For the month of December, our Holy Father asks us to pray for Christians living in areas of war or conflict, especially in the Middle East, that they be seeds of peace, reconciliation and hope.

As St. Pope Paul VI says: If you want peace, work for justice. To do so, we need to go beyond simply analysing wars and conflict as pieces on the chess board of geo-politics; this dehumanises the people who are both willingly involved or unwillingly caught up in them.

The lives lost, the tremendous suffering endured, and the real trauma suffered…all of these happened to real human beings, to both soldiers and civilians alike.

Wars and conflict threaten to drive us into despair, but let us resist it! Let us hope in the Lord who is the source of all hope, who has come to give us a peace that the world cannot give. This is not to pray away the problems of the world; rather, let us learn to see the world as God sees it.

This is how God sees the world: He sees the brokenness and suffering; he is deeply moved by it because he loves us; and he sends his Son into our midst to give us hope. To be moved by suffering is not a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of refusing to dehumanise, and to be dehumanised.

Let us actively fight against the feeling of despair and hold onto the hope that is God. Let us pray and strive for a peace that is, as Pope Leo describes it, unarmed and disarming. May God bless you today.