The Pope rejects a “deformed economy” and the “flattery” of power at the closing of the Jubilee

Pope Leo XIV has praised faith and humanity this Tuesday in the face of “a deformed economy” that reduces everything to business, during the Epiphany mass with which Christmas ends and which has coincided with the closing of the Jubilee. The American pontiff reflected on the threats the church faces and “the numerous conflicts with which men can resist and even attack” God, he warned. “Around us, a distorted economy tries to take advantage of everything. We see it in a market that turns even the human thirst for searching, traveling, and starting over into a business,” he warned.

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Leo XIV presided over the Epiphany Mass this Tuesday in St. Peter’s Basilica, which marks a double end: it concludes his first Christmas as pope, but it has also served to close the Holy Year instituted in 2024 by his late predecessor Francis.

After closing the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, the solemn rite with which the Jubilee ends, the Pope proceeded in procession to the basilica to preside over the Mass before thousands of faithful, cardinals, clerics and with the presence of the President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella.

In his homily, he meditated on the mysterious adoration of the Magi to equate it with the “spiritual search of our contemporaries” which, he assured, “is much richer” than is believed, judging by the more than 33 million pilgrims who have arrived in Rome throughout this Holy Year, according to figures from the Holy See. “Yes, wizards still exist. They are people who accept the challenge of risking their own journey, who in a complicated world like ours, in many ways exclusive and dangerous, feel the need to set out, in search,” he appreciated.

Faced with this flow of the faithful, the pontiff wondered if “there is life in our Church” and defended that “loving and seeking peace means protecting what is holy”, the “small, delicate and fragile”.

On the other hand, the American pontiff warned of the validity of “Herod’s intentions, of the fears always lurking to turn into aggression” towards faith and the church, such as the aforementioned “deformed economy” that reduces everything to mere consumption.

“We see it: the market transforms even the human thirst for searching, traveling, and starting over into business. Let us ask ourselves: has the Jubilee educated us to flee from this type of efficiency that reduces anything to a product and the human being to a consumer?”, he lashed out. Then, to make a plea for welcome by asking the faithful if after the Holy Year they will be able to “recognize in the visitor a pilgrim, in the stranger a seeker, in the distant one a neighbor, in the different one a travel companion.” Because faith, he underlined, “has no price or measure” and does not wait for the church “in prestigious places but in humble realities”. “If we don’t reduce our churches to monuments, if our communities become homes, if we unitedly reject the flattery of the powerful, then we will be the generation of the dawn,” he finished.