In his first Lenten Message as Successor of Peter, Pope Leo XIV has proposed to the Church a spiritual itinerary centered on listening to the Word and on a fast that truly transforms the heart. Under the theme “Listen and fast. Lent as a time of conversion,” the Pontiff invites us to rediscover this liturgical season as an opportunity to return to placing God at the center of personal and community life, in a context marked by interior dispersion, social injustice, and the harshness of public debate.
Leo XIV emphasizes that every conversion begins with listening: an attentive listening to the Word of God that also educates us to recognize the cry of the poor and those who suffer. At the same time, he insists on the concrete dimension of fasting, not only as abstinence from food, but as a discipline of desire and purification of language. In particular, he proposes a form of fasting “little appreciated”: abstaining from hurtful words, hasty judgments, and divisive speeches, promoting instead a language of respect, hope, and peace.
The Pope thus links the Lenten practice with social and ecclesial responsibility, reminding us that conversion affects not only individual conscience, but also the style of relationships, dialogue in the community, and the capacity to respond to the suffering of the world.
Below is the message of Leo XIV:
Dear brothers and sisters:
Lent is the time in which the Church, with maternal solicitude, invites us to place the mystery of God once again at the center of our life, so that our faith may regain its momentum and our heart may not disperse amid daily anxieties and distractions.
Every path of conversion begins when we allow ourselves to be reached by the Word and welcome it with docility of spirit. There is, therefore, a bond between the gift of the Word of God, the space of hospitality we offer it, and the transformation it brings about. For this reason, the Lenten itinerary becomes a favorable occasion to listen to the voice of the Lord and renew the decision to follow Christ, walking with Him the path that leads to Jerusalem, where the mystery of His passion, death, and resurrection is fulfilled.
Listen
This year I would like to draw attention, first of all, to the importance of making space for the Word through listening, since the disposition to listen is the first sign by which the desire to enter into relationship with the other is manifested.
God Himself, in revealing Himself to Moses from the burning bush, shows that listening is a distinctive trait of His being: “I have seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry of complaint” (Ex 3:7). Listening to the cry of the oppressed is the beginning of a story of liberation, in which the Lord also involves Moses, sending him to open a path of salvation for His children reduced to slavery.
It is a God who draws us to Himself, who today also moves us with the thoughts that make His heart vibrate. For this reason, listening to the Word in the liturgy educates us for a more true listening to reality.
Among the many voices that cross our personal and social life, the Sacred Scriptures enable us to recognize the voice that cries out from suffering and injustice, so that it may not go unanswered. Entering into this interior disposition of receptivity means allowing ourselves to be instructed today by God to listen as He does, until we recognize that “the condition of the poor represents a cry that, in the history of humanity, constantly challenges our life, our societies, the political and economic systems, and especially the Church.”[1]
Fast
If Lent is a time of listening, fasting constitutes a concrete practice that disposes us to welcome the Word of God. Abstinence from food, in fact, is an ancient and irreplaceable ascetic exercise on the path of conversion. Precisely because it involves the body, it makes more evident what we are “hungry” for and what we consider essential for our sustenance. It serves, therefore, to discern and order our “appetites,” to keep alive the hunger and thirst for justice, freeing it from resignation, educating it to become prayer and responsibility toward our neighbor.
Saint Augustine, with spiritual subtlety, hints at the tension between the present time and future fulfillment that permeates this care of the heart, when he observes that: “it is proper to mortal men to hunger and thirst for justice, just as being filled with justice is proper to the other life. Of this bread, of this food, the angels are filled; but men, while they hunger, are enlarged; while they are enlarged, they are expanded; while they are expanded, they become capable; and, once capable, in due time they will be filled.”[2] Fasting, understood in this sense, allows us not only to discipline desire, purify it and make it more free, but also to expand it, so that it is directed toward God and oriented toward the good.
However, so that fasting may retain its evangelical truth and avoid the temptation to pride the heart, it must always be lived with faith and humility. It requires remaining rooted in communion with the Lord, because “no one fasts truly who does not know how to nourish himself with the Word of God.”[3] As a visible sign of our interior commitment to distance ourselves, with the help of grace, from sin and evil, fasting must also include other forms of deprivation aimed at acquiring a more sober lifestyle, since “only austerity makes Christian life strong and authentic.”[4]
For this reason, I would like to invite you to a very concrete and often little appreciated form of abstinence, namely, abstaining from using words that affect and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin to disarm language, renouncing hurtful words, immediate judgment, speaking ill of those who are absent and cannot defend themselves, calumnies. Let us strive, instead, to learn to measure words and to cultivate kindness: in the family, among friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media, and in Christian communities. Then, many words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.
Together
Finally, Lent highlights the community dimension of listening to the Word and practicing fasting. Scripture itself underscores this aspect in many ways. For example, when it recounts in the book of Nehemiah that the people gathered to listen to the public reading of the book of the Law and, practicing fasting, disposed themselves to the confession of faith and worship, in order to renew the covenant with God (cf. Ne 9:1-3).
In the same way, our parishes, families, ecclesial groups, and religious communities are called to undertake in Lent a shared path, in which listening to the Word of God, as well as to the cry of the poor and of the earth, becomes a common way of life, and fasting sustains a real repentance. In this horizon, conversion concerns not only the conscience of the individual, but also the style of relationships, the quality of dialogue, the capacity to allow oneself to be challenged by reality and to recognize what truly orients desire, both in our ecclesial communities and in humanity thirsting for justice and reconciliation.
Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask for the grace to live a Lent that makes our ear more attentive to God and to those most in need. Let us ask for the strength of a fast that also reaches the tongue, so that hurtful words may diminish and space may grow for the voice of others. And let us commit ourselves so that our communities become places where the cry of those who suffer finds welcome and listening generates paths of liberation, making us more willing and diligent in contributing to building the civilization of love.
I bless you all heartily, and your Lenten journey.
Vatican, February 5, 2026, memorial of Saint Agatha, virgin and martyr.
LEO XIV PP.