In his first Christmas Day message, Pope Leo XIV urged people to shed indifference and show solidarity with those suffering amid conflicts and crises.
It’s a classic Christmas appeal, but it lands differently in a year where “compassion fatigue” feels real. The Pope’s framing isn’t just about charity as a seasonal mood—it’s a challenge to the modern habit of scrolling past suffering as if it’s unavoidable background noise.
“Indifference” is the word that stings because it doesn’t accuse people of cruelty. It accuses them of numbness: the quiet, everyday decision to disengage when pain feels too far away, too complicated, or too constant to hold.
By calling for solidarity, the message points to something more demanding than sympathy. Solidarity implies action—attention, presence, advocacy, generosity, and the willingness to see people in crisis not as headlines, but as neighbors with names.
Christmas messages often risk sounding abstract. But this one carries a clear moral instruction: if the world feels fragmented and harsh, the first repair isn’t a grand policy announcement. It’s refusing to let suffering become normal.
