At the end of a year marked by the outbreak of fresh wars and by various personal health crises, Pope Francis at Christmas offered a message of hope, saying Jesus’s birth brings light to a dark world and his littleness shows the path of salvation, through humility and love.
Though he also took to task those who profit from and "move the puppet-strings of war", singling out the global arms industry for particular condemnation, while also calling out the "deafening silence" that greets so much of the violence and death happening throughout the world.
