NEW YORK — Pope Leo XIV’s May 8 election in Vatican City, Mary E. Brunkow’s Nobel in Stockholm, a Filipino couple’s floodwater wedding in Malolos and a Los Angeles youth theater’s comeback offered a global snapshot of Good News 2025, Dec. 18, 2025.
The events were unrelated, but the message was familiar: even in a bruising year, people still built, discovered, married and performed.
Good News 2025: four moments that cut through the noise
A pope’s first words, and a new chapter in Rome
Pope Leo XIV became the first American-born pontiff after his May 8 election. In the Vatican’s announcement of the new pope, he opened with, “Peace be with all of you!”
The moment looked sudden, but the arc had been building. In 2023, Pope Francis named Robert Francis Prevost to lead the Vatican office that vets bishops worldwide, a job that raised his profile across the global church — and now reads, to many Catholics, like the runway to Good News 2025.
In early December, Leo told Reuters that as he sensed what was coming, he tried to give up control: “You’re in charge,” he recalled telling God.
A Nobel that crowned decades of immune-system discovery
Brunkow shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about “peripheral immune tolerance,” the body’s ability to avoid attacking itself. The Nobel Prize press release credited Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for work that clarified how regulatory T cells help keep immune responses from spiraling into autoimmune disease.
The award also traced a long line back through the lab. A 2001 Nature Genetics paper co-authored by Brunkow linked the scurfy mouse’s fatal immune disorder to “scurfin,” work that helped open the door to FOXP3’s central role in immune regulation — the kind of slow-burn payoff that belongs in Good News 2025, even if it never goes viral.
A wedding, knee-deep in water, and still on time
July 22, with Tropical Storm Wipha pushing floods across parts of the Philippines, Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar married at Barasoain Church in Malolos, Bulacan. As People reported, photos showed guests wading through the aisle as the bride lifted her gown — an image that moved because it refused to postpone joy.
It also echoed a 2023 wedding at the same church that went viral after a typhoon flooded the building, including a Business Insider account that helped spread the story beyond the Philippines.
Curtain up after the fire
In Pacific Palisades, a January wildfire destroyed the Pierson Playhouse and the gear that Theatre Palisades Youth relied on. The troupe kept rehearsing, and by late February opened “Crazy for You” in a borrowed auditorium. The Associated Press described a comeback powered by donations, borrowed equipment and the steadying routine of rehearsal.
It is easy to dismiss feel-good moments as a distraction. But Good News 2025, stitched across faith, science and neighborhood stages, also served as proof: people can still adapt — and keep going.
