John Paul II thanks the Roman Curia for its collaboration as he marks Christmas and the twenty-fifth year of his pontificate. Reflecting through the Year of the Rosary, he presents this Marian prayer as fundamentally Christ-centred: by contemplating Christ, believers learn to read humanity and history in the light of the Gospel. He mourns the suffering caused by war, terrorism, and other conflicts, and urges prayer, interfaith dialogue, and a peace founded on truth, justice, love, and freedom.

Concern for creation leads him to call for a new ecological awareness, recalling a joint declaration with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. He describes the Church's international work as service of human dignity, human rights, solidarity, and the common good, and recalls Pius XII's vision of a peaceful order. The World Youth Day in Toronto reveals young people's missionary vocation, while ecumenical meetings with the Orthodox Churches of Greece and Romania offer signs of hope. Holiness, manifested in the saints and in the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Poland, remains the Church's central priority. He closes by entrusting the Curia to Christ and Mary and praying for renewed joy in service to the Holy See.