As the Christmas Octave and the year 2025 draw to a close, the Catholic Church invites us to pause prayerfully and do something that is right and just, our duty and salvation, always and everywhere: to give thanks.
As we approach the end of the civil year, the Church’s liturgy places on our lips one of her most ancient and venerable hymns, the Te Deum, which for 17 centuries has helped form the Christian conscience and shape our understanding of time and history.
At the end of vespers in St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 31, Pope Leo XIV led the Church in singing once again this ancient prayer, which the Church intones during the Office of Readings on Sundays and solemnities throughout the year (except Lent), as well as on feasts and octaves.
The Te Deum begins, “We praise you, O God; we confess you as Lord.” It concludes, “In you, Lord, have I hoped, and I will not be ashamed eternally.” It begins with thanks and praise, in other words, and ends with hope and trust. Trust and thanksgiving, hope and praise, belong together with prayer.
Thanksgiving without trust can quickly become superficial; trust without gratitude, cold and fragile. Praise without hope is ephemeral; hope without praise is shallow. The Church teaches us, as one year ends and another begins, how to buttress each by its relation to the other.
Chanting the Te Deum as the prayerful exclamation point of one year and the diving board for the next helps us see time not as a chronicle of successes and failures, births and deaths, but as a kairos (decisive moment) lived under God’s gaze.
The Te Deum places our focus first on the majesty and holiness of God the Father before shifting to Jesus Christ as the eternal only-begotten Son, the King of glory, born of the Virgin Mary, risen from the dead, opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers, and sitting at the right hand of the Father to judge the living and the dead. The chant reminds us that the Son of God’s mission has its origin from all eternity yet unfolds in history.
St. Paul reminds us, indeed, that time reached its fullness when God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law (Galatians 4:4). The Incarnation is the decisive event of history, when the eternal Son of the Father took flesh of the Virgin Mary, redeeming both time and each moment of human life.
As St. John Paul II commented at the 1999 Te Deum:
“Human beings are thus offered an inconceivable prospect: They can aspire to be sons of the Son, heirs with him to the same glorious destiny. The earthly pilgrimage is thus a journey that occurs in God’s time. Its goal is God himself, the fullness of time in eternity.”
The world mostly tries to distract us from the significance of the passage of time with noise, amusement and lots of alcohol. Notable TV hosts preside as emcees, introducing musicians who sing as everyone waits for the descent of an illuminated ball from Times Square.
The Church, by contrast, pauses in prayerful awe, looking at the year that has passed in the light of Christ and entrusting the year to come to divine Providence.
While journalistic year-end summaries focus on what made headlines throughout the previous 12 months — worldly winners and losers, the litany of human sufferings caused by homicidal atrocities, natural disasters, and other forms of violence, as well as a catalogue of the obituaries of prominent figures — the Church contemplatively looks at what can often remain hidden: divine and human fidelity, loving sacrifice, and the growth of mustard seeds.
The Te Deum calibrates our eyes to see more deeply, to behold God in the midst of human life and activities, as he brings good even out of the evil we endure or commit.
At the end of 2025, there’s much gratitude that should fill our Te Deum.
We give thanks for all of the graces of the Jubilee of Hope.
We give thanks for the peaceful death of Pope Francis, called home on the day after Easter, after he had been able to proclaim anew in St. Peter’s Square his and the Church’s faith in Jesus’ resurrection and ours.
We give thanks for the stunning election of the first Pope ever from the United States. We also express our gratitude for the way Pope Leo XIV has serenely and energetically begun his pontificate, leading the Church throughout the Jubilee of Hope and emphasizing the Church’s unity in Christ. When he was chosen by his brother cardinals, he was the first pope in more than 35 years under age 70, and his youthful vigor showed especially in two moving occasions, when he carried the cross throughout St. Peter’s Square through the Jubilee doors of the Vatican basilica and when he carried his Eucharistic Lord, processing throughout the streets of Rome on Corpus Christi.
We give thanks for the missionary imprint he has placed on his papacy. From his first words on May 8 from St. Peter’s balcony, the first pontiff since St. Peter to have served as a missionary to the nations has sought to help the Church become ever more a “missionary Church.”
We give thanks for all the new Catholics this year, in our parishes, in our families, on our campuses and in missionary territories.
We give thanks for all the conversions, baptisms, confessions, Masses and devout Communions, confirmations, marriages, ordinations and anointings.
We give thanks for all of the graces he has given us, including the crosses, and the births as well as the deaths, which we pray, by his mercy, were themselves births into eternal life.
We give thanks, in short, for all of the ways in which God’s saving will was accomplished this year.
Beyond thanks, we also must humbly ask for forgiveness for all of the times we have not corresponded with his will and must pray in reparation for the ways in which we and others have chosen to live in ways incompatible with the love of him and our neighbors. We do so with praise and gratitude for his mercy that endures forever (Psalm 136). We likewise ask for his help for the new civil year about to begin, that 2026 might be a true “year of the Lord” (A.D.) and one in which grace will build upon grace (John 1:16). We do so, following the lead of Blessed Solanus Casey, “thanking God ahead of time.”
The Te Deum has been rendered into English in various translations. The most famous is Holy God, We Praise Thy Name, whose connection with the Te Deum is easily recognized when we sing all seven verses. Others are God, We Praise You and O God Beyond All Praising. All are apt expressions of the near-ineffable praise we should have for God himself and of gratitude for all he does.
The Church’s end-of-the-year Te Deum takes place normally during solemn vespers on the vigil of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, which is quite fitting. Mary is the one who, assisted by the Holy Spirit, has taught the Church in her Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) how to praise and thank God.
At Evening Prayer each day, including Dec. 31, the Church with her proclaims the Lord’s greatness and rejoices in God our Savior for all the ways he has looked upon us in our lowliness, poverty, hunger and need and done great things for us, lifting us, filling us with good things and being faithful to his promise of mercy.
As Pope Leo reminded us today:
“… the Holy Mother of God, the smallest and the highest of creatures, sees things with the gaze of God. … God loves to hope through the hearts of the little ones, and he does so by involving them in his plan of salvation. The more beautiful the plan, the greater the hope. And indeed, the world continues like this, driven by the hope of so many simple people, unknown but not to God, who, despite everything, believe in a better tomorrow, because they know that the future is in the hands of the One who offers them the greatest hope.”
We unite ourselves to Mary in a special way at the end of one year and the beginning of the next, as we entrust ourselves to her maternal care, try to imitate her faithful fiat, and pray for the grace to let 2026 develop fully according to God’s will, begging that, like her, our whole life may increasingly become a Magnificat and Te Deum.
