Pope Leo's Message for Jubilee of Indigenous Peoples Highlights Latin American Theology
Your Pope Leo Weekly for October 20, 2025
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We can only be a People if we truly surrender ourselves to God’s power, to his action in us.
Pope Leo XIV, 16 October 2025
Highlight of the Week: Jubilee for Indigenous Peoples
Last week, Pope Leo delivered written remarks for the occasion of the Jubilee for Indigenous Peoples, the latest special event for the Jubilee Year of Hope. This event, co-organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM), was held virtually from October 14-16. The Holy Father did not attend over Zoom; instead, his statement was read by Bishop José Hiraís Acosta Beltrán of the Mexican Diocese of Huejutla.
In his message, Pope Leo exhorts indigenous communities to be open to forgiveness, recalling how peace and reconciliation cannot be a one-sided affair. Those who have committed evil must repent and seek forgiveness; equally important, those who have been harmed must ask for the grace to forgive.
The long history of evangelization experienced by our indigenous peoples, as the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean have so often taught, is fraught with “lights and shadows”. Saint Augustine applies this to the servants of the Gospel, saying: “If [a man] is good, he clings to God and works with God, but if he is bad, God produces through him the visible form of the sacrament, but God himself gives the invisible grace. Let us all hold this view, and let there be no divisions among us” (Letter 105, 12). In this way, the Jubilee, a precious time for forgiveness, invites us to “forgive our brothers from the heart” (cf. Mt 18:35), to reconcile ourselves with our own history and to give thanks to God for his mercy towards us.
Pope Leo goes on to discuss the role of culture in evangelization, emphasizing that it is from within the heart of each particular culture that the Gospel takes root and eventually develops into new and surprising forms of Christian life. A people’s culture is not nullified so as to assimilate into the Church; rather, the Gospel finds a new “home”, so to speak, and a new expression in each unique culture that receives it. The content of revelation is always the same, but the way faith in Christ is lived out among the peoples of the earth develops organically in history. The pope writes,
Thus, recognizing both the highlights and the wounds of our past, we understand that we can only be a People if we truly surrender ourselves to God’s power, to his action in us. He, who has planted the “seeds of the Word” in all cultures, makes them blossom in a new and surprising way, pruning them so that they bear more fruit (cf. Jn 15:2). My predecessor, Saint John Paul II, affirmed this: “The power of the Gospel everywhere transforms and regenerates. When that power enters into a culture, it is no surprise that it rectifies many of its elements. There would be no catechesis if it were the Gospel that had to change when it came into contact with the cultures.”
Hence, in dialogue and encounter, we learn from different ways of seeing the world, we appreciate what is unique and original in each culture, and together we discover the abundant life that Christ offers to all peoples. This new life is given to us precisely because we share the fragility of the human condition marked by original sin, and because we have been touched by the grace of Christ, who shed every last drop of his blood for us, so that we might have “life in abundance” (cf. Jn 10:10), healing and redeeming all those who open their hearts to the grace that was given to us.
Read the whole thing ➜ Message of the Holy Father for the Jubilee of Indigenous Peoples
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Quick Dive: “The Peoples” and Evangelization
At first glance, this little address might seem to be just a blip on the radar screen of all the big-ticket items on Pope Leo’s itinerary this month. After all, this event wasn’t held in person at the Vatican as the other Jubilee celebrations have been, and he didn’t even deliver the comments himself. However, it is worth a closer look for two reasons.
First of all, it takes great courage to call on anyone to forgive, especially when they have been seriously harmed by the sins of others. But that is exactly what Pope Leo has done here, a striking reminder that forgiving those who have trespassed against us, in imitation of the Lord himself, is at the heart of the Christian life. This does not diminish the need for repentance on the part of the trespasser, but instead acknowledges what the Gospel reveals about genuine peace: it is not a cold and sterile ceasefire but rather the mutual decision of both wounder and wounded to embrace one another as brothers and begin again, together.
Second, Pope Leo clearly recognizes the relevance to this audience of indigenous communities of the question: What does it mean to be a People? In this he is once again showing how deeply influenced he has been by Latin American theology, particularly the “theology of the people,” which emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a response to Marxism and has offered important correctives to the excesses of liberation theology. In this context, “the people” (el pueblo) is understood as a community bound together by culture and a shared history—a national identity, for example—and as the environment in which evangelization occurs.
In this sense, it is interesting that Leo chooses in this address to cite Pope John Paul II, since it was during his pontificate that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its official censure of liberation theology. Leo seems to be pointing out an unlikely synthesis between the Latin American theologians who recognized the need to prioritize love and liberation for the poor and the Polish pope who spoke so often of the “New Evangelization.”
Go Deeper: The Gospel Embedded in Culture
From Catechesi Tradendae, “On Catechesis in Our Time” (John Paul II, 1979)
“The term ‘acculturation’ or ‘inculturation’ may be a neologism, but it expresses very well one factor of the great mystery of the Incarnation.” We can say of catechesis, as well as of evangelization in general, that it is called to bring the power of the Gospel into the very heart of culture and cultures. For this purpose, catechesis will seek to know these cultures and their essential components; it will learn their most significant expressions; it will respect their particular values and riches. In this manner it will be able to offer these cultures the knowledge of the hidden mystery and help them to bring forth from their own living tradition original expressions of Christian life, celebration and thought. Two things must however be kept in mind.
On the one hand the Gospel message cannot be purely and simply isolated from the culture in which it was first inserted (the biblical world or, more concretely, the cultural milieu in which Jesus of Nazareth lived), nor, without serious loss, from the cultures in which it has already been expressed down the centuries; it does not spring spontaneously from any cultural soil; it has always been transmitted by means of an apostolic dialogue which inevitably becomes part of a certain dialogue of cultures.
On the other hand, the power of the Gospel everywhere transforms and regenerates. When that power enters into a culture, it is no surprise that it rectifies many of its elements. There would be no catechesis if it were the Gospel that had to change when it came into contact with the cultures.
To forget this would simply amount to what St. Paul very forcefully calls “emptying the cross of Christ of its power.”
It is a different matter to take, with wise discernment, certain elements, religious or otherwise, that form part of the cultural heritage of a human group and use them to help its members to understand better the whole of the Christian mystery. Genuine catechists know that catechesis “takes flesh” in the various cultures and milieux: one has only to think of the peoples with their great differences, of modern youth, of the great variety of circumstances in which people find themselves today. But they refuse to accept an impoverishment of catechesis through a renunciation or obscuring of its message, by adaptations, even in language, that would endanger the “precious deposit” of the faith, or by concessions in matters of faith or morals. They are convinced that true catechesis eventually enriches these cultures by helping them to go beyond the defective or even inhuman features in them, and by communicating to their legitimate values the fullness of Christ.
