What A Year 2025 Has Been

Reflection on Christmas Day

by Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David

Pope Francis declared 2025 a Year of Hope.

And yet, it was also the year he died—leaving the Church in mourning even as we welcomed a new shepherd in Pope Leo.

For many Filipinos, it did not feel like a year of hope at all.

We witnessed horrors long buried finally surface—the unresolved anguish of the missing sabungeros, the families of drug war victims still waiting for justice, and flood-control projects meant to save lives exposed instead as monuments to corruption.

We saw scenes of total disaster: communities stranded on rooftops, waiting for rescue; flash floods carrying thick mud and boulders into already crowded urban neighborhoods; cars piled up like matchboxes; homes shattered into rubble by earthquakes.

Beyond the visible destruction, there was quieter devastation too—we heard the cries of parents watching their families unravel under the grip of online gambling addiction, a disaster without floodwaters or fault lines, but no less ruinous.

We saw power fracture in strange and unsettling ways:

a former president arrested abroad for crimes against humanity;

an impeachment that died without a trial;

political dynasties shaken but not dismantled;

siblings turning against siblings in full public view;

a national budget that raised more questions than confidence.

The streets filled with protests.

Institutions faltered.

Public trust thinned.

And yet—if we listen carefully—this is precisely where hope must be located.

As the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once said, hope is not optimism. It is not the denial of darkness. True hope is born in the very moment when despair seems most logical—like light that shines brightest not at noon, but at midnight.

Christmas Eve 2025 Mass at San Roque Cathedral presided by H.E. Pablo Virgilio Cardinal David.

Hope showed itself in small but real ways this year:

in journalists who refused silence,

in citizens who kept watch,

in voters who surprised the powerful,

in families who refused to forget their dead,

in a people who, despite exhaustion, still ask: Can we be better than this?

Hope is fragile.

But it is stubborn.

Perhaps 2025 did not feel like a Year of Hope because hope, when it is real, is never comfortable. It demands vigilance, memory, moral courage. And the refusal to surrender our future to cynicism.

As we move forward, may we remember:

hope is not what we feel when things go well—

it is what we choose when they do not.

May the darkness of this year not extinguish us, but teach us why hope still matters.

May our God of surprises—

born as a fragile little Child in a stable in Bethlehem,

shining as a bright light in the midst of darkness—

surprise us again with hope where we least expect it.

Merry Christmas!

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San Roque Cathedral, Diocese of Kalookan