To Deny The Poor is To Deny God, Pope Leo Says During Midnight Mass

Pope Leo uses his first Christmas homily to issue stark warning on mistreating the poor and migrants.

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Pope Leo’s Christmas celebrations began with an unexpected gesture of hospitality. Before the liturgy even started, the newly elected pontiff — the first American to lead the Church — walked out into St. Peter’s Square to welcome about 5,000 people standing under a cold downpour.

The basilica was filled to its 6,000-person capacity, yet Leo made sure those stuck outside knew they weren’t forgotten. “I admire and respect and thank you for your courage and your wanting to be here this evening,” he told them, praising their perseverance “even in this weather.”

It was a small moment, but a telling one: the pope literally stepped beyond the comfortable confines of the church to be with people who had no room inside. That image set the stage for the message he would soon deliver in his homily.

When Pope Leo ascended to the pulpit and began to preach, he drew everyone’s attention to the very scene of Christ’s birth: a newborn baby laid in a manger “because there was no place for them in the inn”.

In that biblical detail, Leo suggested, lies a mirror for our own time. “There is no room for God if there is no room for the human person,” Leo said.

“To refuse one is to refuse the other.”

If we shut out our fellow human beings — the poor, the stranger, the vulnerable — we are shutting out God himself. This has been a consistent theme of Pope Leo’s nascent papacy, which from day one has put society’s most neglected at the heart of the Church’s concern.

On this holy night, he framed it as the core of the Christmas story. God did not choose a palace or even an inn for the Incarnation, but a stable on the margins. Therefore, a faith that celebrates God being born among us must never turn its back on those who lack room in our world.

Pope Leo lamented how easily human dignity is cast aside in today’s society. “While a distorted economy leads us to treat human beings as mere merchandise, God becomes like us, revealing the infinite dignity of every person,” the pope observed, contrasting worldly indifference with the Christmas miracle.

In other words, the Creator of the universe humbled himself to become a helpless child — affirming forever that each human life is precious. Leo also quoted St. Augustine, who taught that human pride drags us down and only divine humility can lift us up.

The humility of Bethlehem, Leo implied, is the antidote to the arrogance behind so many of our injustices. His homily cited wars, poverty, and a “throwaway culture” by implication, without needing to name names.

The message was clear: whenever we dehumanize or discard others, we refuse the very God we claim to worship. But whenever we open our hearts and doors to our neighbors in need, we create space for God to dwell with us.

As the pope put it, “Where there is room for the human person, there is room for God.”

Even a lowly manger, he noted, became a holy cradle — “even a stable can become more sacred than a temple,” when it welcomes the presence of the Lord.

Leo’s remarks bring to mind an old poetic adage often attributed to William Blake:

“I sought my God and my God I couldn’t find;
I sought my soul and my soul eluded me;
I sought to serve my brother in his need, and I found all three — my God, my soul, and thee.”

Leo urged the faithful not to look for God in distant stars or abstract ideologies, but in the flesh-and-blood reality of our brothers and sisters.

In his homily,Pope Leo XIV essentially re-issued the Gospel challenge for our age: Will we make room?

Will we make room for the migrant family at the border, for the child in the womb and the child in poverty, for the neighbor who is lonely or the stranger who is different?

The way we answer that argued, Leo suggested, is the way we answer God.

Christmas celebrates Emmanuel, “God with us,” the astonishing closeness of the divine to humanity. Pope Leo’s homily reminded everyone that this closeness isn’t just a comforting thought — it’s a calling.

If God has thrown in his lot with every human being, then welcoming others is no longer a mere option or seasonal charity. It’s the very practice of faith.

As Pope Leo proclaimed, echoing the angels, Christmas heralds “a feast of faith, charity and hope.” But those lofty words have legs only if we carry them into the world by how we treat one another.

In celebrating a God who made room for us, we are tasked to make room for each other. This is how joy flourishes and hope lights up even the darkest night.

At the close of Mass, Pope Leo carried the figurine of baby Jesus in procession to the Nativity scene in the Basilia, a tender ritual symbolizing Christ’s presence among us.

His homily, however, leaves us with a far more challenging image of the Nativity — one that doesn’t let us off the hook with sentimentality. It asks us to picture that cramped stable in Bethlehem and see in it a call to action.

The Holy Family found room in a manger because someone opened a door to them in their hour of need. Today, we are asked to do the same for those who knock at our doors.

Pope Leo has given us our Christmas homework: to let the manger in our hearts be filled with love for others, so that in loving them, we may finally encounter our God.

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