VATICAN CITY: Pope Leo XIV decried poverty on Sunday, urging world leaders and Catholics to reach out to marginalised people, as the Church celebrated a “Jubilee of the Poor”.

The US pope has made social justice a key theme of his papacy, now in its sixth month since being made head of the world’s Catholics in May following the death of Pope Francis.

The Church, Leo said during a mass at St Peter’s Basilica, is “still wounded by old and new forms of poverty”, but “hopes to be ‘mother of the poor, a place of welcome and justice’”.

Sunday marked a special Jubilee of the Poor, one of many such celebrations during the holy year, which has drawn pilgrims from around the world. It fell on the World Day of the Poor, an annual observance begun by Francis in 2017.

Following mass, Pope Leo was to attend a lunch at the Vatican with a group of homeless people, refugees and the disabled, while other community events to help the poor were planned around Rome.

“I urge heads of state and the leaders of nations to listen to the cry of the poorest,” said Leo during his address.

“There can be no peace without justice, and the poor remind us of this in many ways, through migration as well as through their cries, which are often stifled by the myth of well-being and progress that does not take everyone into account, and indeed forgets many individuals, leaving them to their fate,” he said.

Beyond poverty itself, he cited “many moral and spiritual situations of poverty”, resulting in loneliness.

Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2025