The Pope has offered a harrowing vision of the future, saying he has seen signs of an even darker time for humanity.

At a Mass at the Vatican, the Pope, 85, said on Sunday that he has a dire vision for the world with ‘omens of even greater destruction and desolation’.

The Mass was commemorating the feast of Our Lady Guadalupe, which fell yesterday. It commemorates the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a young man, Saint Juan Diego, in 1531 in Mexico City. The day is a national holiday in Mexico.

But despite the current difficult times for the world – including wars, particularly Russia’s conflict in Ukraine, the rising cost of living, poverty, famine, and an international energy crisis – the Pope said he has a vision that things will get worse.

In his homily, the pontiff said ‘it is a bitter time, filled with the rumbling of war, growing injustice, famine, poverty and suffering,’ but at this ‘bleak and disconcerting’ time, there are ‘omens of even greater destruction and desolation’.

He added that at Christmas, God’s ‘divine love and his coming down to us tell us that this too is a propitious time of salvation, in which the Lord, through the Virgin Mother, continues to give us his Son’.

He urged the Vatican congregation ‘to get involved with each other without delay, to go out to meet our brothers and sisters who have been forgotten and discarded by our consumerist and indifferent societies’.

The pontiff recounted the Bible verse from John 3:16: ‘God who so loved the world, sent us his son, ‘born of a woman’, so that ‘whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”.