The two themes of Pope Leo’s 2025 Christmas Greetings are mission and communion.

Pope Leo XIV explains that the Church’s missionary character “flows from the fact that God himself first set out toward us and, in Christ, came in search of us. Mission begins in the heart of the Most Holy Trinity…. The first great “exodus,” then, is God’s own — his going forth from himself to meet us. The mystery of Christmas proclaims precisely this: the Son’s mission consists in his coming into the world (cf. Saint Augustine, The Trinity, IV, 20, 28).”

This missionary character, Pope Leo XIV continues, “is closely linked to communion“:

While the mystery of Christmas celebrates the mission of the Son of God among us, it also contemplates its purpose, namely that God has reconciled the world to himself through Christ (cf. 2 Cor 5:19) and in him made us his children.  Christmas reminds us that Jesus came to reveal the true face of God as Father, so that we might all become his children and therefore brothers and sisters to one another.  The Father’s love, embodied and revealed by Jesus in his liberating actions and preaching, enables us, in the Holy Spirit, to be a sign of a new humanity — no longer founded on selfishness and individualism, but on mutual love and solidarity.