This was the advice the Pope gave at the end of the general audience, held in a Paul VI Hall decked with firs and Christmas colors.
“May the Lord grant everyone a happy Christmas and a New Year full of love and peace,” he said in Spanish a few minutes earlier to the Latin American and Spanish pilgrims.
John Paul II was visibly moved when 500 Polish pilgrims present sang a song accompanied by the military band of the Alpines of Podhale, where “the mountains of my land” are, he said speaking in his maternal tongue.
At the end of the general audience, when the Pope greeted a delegation of the Regional Council of Apulia, of southern Italy, he expressed in the presence of 9,000 pilgrims “his pleasure because of the commitment demonstrated [by those politicians] in defense of human life and support of the family, founded on marriage.”
source: zenit
