Pope Leo XIV’s prayer intention for November

“The Lord is the refuge of the poor” is the title of Pope Leo XIV’s Message for the 10th World Day of the Poor for this month of November. Accordingly, the Pontiff dedicates his prayer intention for the month to the “proper use of wealth”.

In his prayer, the Pope addresses the “Lord of life” and acknowledges that God provides all we have: the fertile land, our personal talents and the efforts of those who came before us. “Nothing is ours alone; everything is a shared gift”, he says in his prayer. The Pontiff admits that wealth, “desired or attained”, can harden the heart and make us forget the most fragile. Pope Leo asks forgiveness “for accumulating instead of sharing, for using goods as power rather than as service”. In response, he reminds us that true wealth “lies not in what we keep, but in what we give with love”, and he asks the Holy Spirit to help us learn to use money, time, talents and opportunities as “instruments of fraternity”, so that every economic, family or community decision springs from a “free heart”. The prayer concludes by asking for the grace to be witnesses of “wealth turned into service and mercy”, a sign of the Kingdom of justice and peace.

Increasingly concentrated wealth

The Pope’s prayer intention responds to a reality closely tied to current events. Household financial wealth reached a record EUR 268.4 trillion in 2025, up 8.6% from the previous year, according to the Allianz Global Wealth Report 2026. Even so, wealth does not reach everyone: in the countries analyzed, the richest 10% of the population own 85.4% of net financial assets, while the bottom half, almost 3 billion people, own practically nothing.

Meanwhile, the number of people with the greatest wealth keeps growing. According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, 2025 added almost one million new US dollar millionaires, more than 2,600 a day, and since 2020 average wealth has been drifting further from median wealth, that is, from the wealth of a typical person. Gains are therefore unevenly distributed: the wealth of the richest grows faster than that of a typical person.

Leo XIV’s message for the 10th World Day of the Poor

Leo XIV had already warned about this paradox in his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te (4 October 2025): in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, the Pope notes, there is also a growing “wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury” (no. 11). And he warns that this feeds a throwaway culture that tolerates with indifference that millions of people live in conditions unfit for human beings.

The same message runs through the Message for the 10th World Day of the Poor, which will be celebrated on 15 November 2026 under the theme “The Lord is the refuge of the poor.” In it, the Pope contrasts the obsession of those who accumulate wealth only for themselves with God’s steadfastness, which opens hearts and welcomes all, and proposes an examination of conscience that includes an uncomfortable question: “Are we aware of our own poverty, and do we prefer it to unjust wealth? Do we go where the poor are, experiencing their marginalization? Do we listen to their thoughts and share their hopes?”.

In May 2021, Pope Francis dedicated his prayer intention to “The world of finance”, asking us to pray that those responsible for finance collaborate with governments to regulate financial markets and protect citizens from their dangers.