HOMILY OF THE HOLY FATHER LEO XIV
Jubilee of Marian Spirituality
St. Peter’s Square — 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 12, 2025
Dear brothers and sisters:
The Apostle Paul addresses each one of us today, as he does Timothy: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descended from David” (2 Tm 2:8). Marian spirituality, which nourishes our faith, has Jesus at its center. Like Sunday, which opens each new week on the horizon of his resurrection from the dead. “Remember Jesus Christ”: this is the only thing that matters, this is what makes the difference between human spiritualities and the way of God. “Chained like a criminal” (v. 9), Paul urges us not to lose the center, not to empty the name of Jesus of his history, of his cross. What we consider excessive and crucify, God raises up because “he cannot deny himself” (v. 13). Jesus is God’s fidelity, God’s fidelity to himself. Therefore, it is necessary that Sunday make us Christians, that is, that it fill our feeling and thinking with the incandescent memory of Jesus, modifying our coexistence, our way of inhabiting the earth. All Christian spirituality develops from this fire and contributes to making it more alive.
The reading from the Second Book of Kings (5:14-17) has reminded us of the healing of Naaman the Syrian. Jesus himself comments on this passage in the synagogue of Nazareth (cf. Lk 4:27), and the effect of his interpretation on the people of his town was disconcerting. To say that God had saved that foreign leper instead of those in Israel triggered a general reaction: “When they heard these words, all those in the synagogue were filled with fury and, rising up, drove him out of the town to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, intending to throw him down the cliff” (Lk 4:28-29). The evangelist does not mention the presence of Mary, who might have been there and experienced what the elderly Simeon had announced to her when she brought the child Jesus to the Temple: “This child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that is contradicted, and a sword will pierce your own soul too. Thus the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed” (Lk 2:34-35).
Yes, dear brothers and sisters, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword: it penetrates to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). Thus the Spirit acts in the life of the Church. Addressing the Roman Curia, I said that that man was obliged to live with armor: it weighed on him. His armor, the same one that provided him prestige, actually covered a fragile, wounded, sick humanity. We often find this contradiction in our lives: sometimes great gifts are the armor to cover great fragilities. […] If Naaman had only continued accumulating medals to put on his armor, in the end he would have been devoured by leprosy; apparently alive, yes, but closed and isolated in his illness. Jesus frees us from this danger, He who does not wear armor but is born and dies naked; He who offers his gift without obliging the healed lepers to acknowledge him: only a Samaritan, in the Gospel, seems to realize that he has been saved (cf. Lk 17:11-19). Perhaps, the fewer titles one can boast, the clearer it is that love is gratuitous. God is pure gift, grace alone, but how many voices and convictions can separate us even today from this naked and disruptive truth!
Brothers and sisters, Marian spirituality is at the service of the Gospel: it reveals its simplicity. Affection for Mary of Nazareth makes us, together with her, disciples of Jesus, it educates us to return to Him, to meditate and to relate the events of life in which the Risen One continues to visit and call us. Marian spirituality immerses us in the history over which the heavens opened, it helps us to see the proud dispersed in the thoughts of their hearts, the powerful cast down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty. It commits us to fill the hungry with good things, to exalt the lowly, to remember God’s mercy and to trust in the power of his arm (cf. Lk 1:51-54). His Kingdom, in fact, comes and involves us, just as it did Mary, to whom he asked for her “yes,” pronounced once, and then renewed day after day.
The lepers in the Gospel who do not return to give thanks remind us, in fact, that God’s grace can also reach us and find no response, can heal us and continue without committing them. Let us beware, then, of that ascent to the temple that does not lead us to glorify Jesus. There are forms of religiosity, even Marian, that can be centered on ourselves and not on Him. Mary’s Magnificat educates us in the joy of those who know they are loved by God. Mary, with the joy of the Magnificat, invites us to be a Church that does not fold in on itself, but opens to the world with the concrete witness of faith, which risks turning into ideology if it encloses itself in empty words.
Mary’s path follows that of Jesus, and Jesus’ is toward every human being, especially toward the poor, the wounded, the sinners. Therefore, authentic Marian spirituality makes God’s tenderness, his motherhood, actual in the Church. “For—as we read in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium—every time we look to Mary, we come to believe in the revolutionary nature of tenderness and affection. In her we see that humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong, who have no need to mistreat others to feel important. Looking at her, we discover that the one who praised God because he ‘has brought down the powerful from their thrones’ and ‘has sent the rich away empty’ (cf. Lk 1:52.53) is the one who brings the warmth of home to our search for justice” (n. 288).
Dear brothers and sisters, in this world that seeks justice and peace, let us keep Christian spirituality alive, popular devotion to those events and places that, blessed by God, have changed the face of the earth forever. Let us make it a motor of renewal and transformation, as the Jubilee asks, a time of conversion and restitution, of reestablishment and liberation. May the Most Holy Mary, our hope, intercede for us and always guide us toward Jesus, the crucified Lord. In Him is salvation for all.