A New Year’s Message
Wednesday, 31st December 2025
The arrival of a new year, a universal celebration, varies across cultures, in date and rituals. We celebrate a new year’s arrival according to our Gregorian calendar, i.e., according to the way we mark history in years and centuries, starting with the birth of Christ.
But for all human beings, the beginning of a new year contains deep meaning and messages with validity for all humanity. Because, beyond changing how we write the date, this celebration represents many of our ongoing longings for change, renewal, and hope for better times.
The beginning of a new year, in all cultures, is an opportunity for evaluation, inventory, good resolutions, to close cycles, and to welcome new beginnings in the different areas of human existence. We celebrate the new year with the joy of being able to rewrite our personal, family, and social history, leaving the old and the bad behind for the hope of better stories and a better world.
The arrival of a new year asks us for moments of reflection, self-examination, and introspection. A new year, a new beginning, asks us all to pause along the way, to straighten the path, evaluating and being grateful for what we have lived and learned, while addressing the challenges that await us all in the new year. Only by carefully weighing and considering our achievements and mistakes can we – through human growth – make the coming year a year that is truly “new”.
It is a tradition that, for the new year, human beings, full of the best intentions, make resolutions and set out to meet objectives and goals. This custom has its roots in ancient times, when individuals and communities promised the gods to achieve goals in exchange for blessings. Today, the custom remains as a way to commit oneself to achieving new personal, family, or professional goals.
The arrival of the New Year is also an occasion to get together with family and friends. It is a time to strengthen emotional bonds, to share joys and dreams, and to keep traditions alive. In an increasingly individualistic world, with more people living in isolation and solitude, this celebration fosters ties and connects us to each other, from the noblest values that dwell in the human heart.
But the celebration of a new year reminds us, and makes us happy for, the opportunity to start again, improve, change, and take up new paths. This profoundly anthropological experience fills us with hope, the driving force of our lives and history. Because it is the hope for better days and in a new and better future and world that encourages us amid our daily struggles and fills our days on earth with enthusiasm and meaning.
We do not live these desires and struggles, this celebration, and this hope for better times alone, but in community. This means that we are not alone in our shared pursuits and dreams and that achieving the good, new, and better must be a collective, generous, joint, committed, and supportive conquest: an accomplishment that belongs to all of us, forever.
In addition, the celebration of the new year is an opportune time for gratitude, to be grateful for all the good, and to learn from the less good. Thus, we are able to give thanks and discover goodness in all that we are, have, and all that happens to us. In short, we are able to be happy.
Our social reality, national and global, is full of challenges, of much to change and improve. But changes in institutions and social structures start with a change in the heart of each human being.
And since the celebration of the New Year is a reflection of the deepest and best desires of human beings and of all humanity, let us take advantage of the beginning of this 2026 to walk better paths that lead us to the achievement of better personal, family, and social stories.
Let's make the arrival of a new year truly new. HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!
