Pope’s year-end message warns about ‘tyranny of evil’

VATICAN CITY – In the final hours of 2015, Pope Francis is encouraging humanity to hang on to recollections of good deeds, so that gestures of goodness can be seen triumphing over evil.

Francis was presiding over a year’s end prayer service Thursday evening in St. Peter’s Basilica, where he mused about how people are sometimes driven by “insatiable thirst for power and by gratuitous violence.” He says it was impossible to forget “so many days marked by violence, by death, by the unspeakable suffering of so many innocents.”

Still, Francis is calling attention to what he called “great gestures of goodness, love and solidarity” that don’t make headlines.

Francis says: “These signs of love can’t and mustn’t be obscured by the tyranny of evil,” and that good always triumphs.