Pope Francis waves to people in St. Peter’s Square during his Regina caeli address May 2, 2021. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA.
Vatican City, May 2, 2021 / 05:30 am (CNA).
It is our task as Christians to proclaim the good news of the Gospel and to bear the good fruit of love in the world, Pope Francis said at his Regina caeli address on Sunday.
“The fruit that, like the branches, we must give, bears witness to our Christian life,” the pope said May 2.
“After Jesus ascended to the Father, it is the task of the disciples – it is our task – to continue to proclaim the Gospel in words and in deeds,” he added. “And they and us, disciples of Jesus, do so by bearing witness to his love: the fruit to be borne is love.”
Francis gave his weekly Sunday reflection from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Afterward, he led the recitation of the Regina caeli, a Marian prayer said during the Easter season.
The pope explained the importance of being attached to Christ, the vine, so that “we receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and in this way we can do good to our neighbor and do good to society, to the Church.”
“We recognize the tree by its fruits,” he stated. “A truly Christian life bears witness to Christ.”
Pope Francis’ meditation centered on the day’s Gospel reading from St. John, in which Jesus tells his disciples “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”
“The Lord presents himself as the true vine, and speaks of us as the branches that cannot live without being united to him,” the pope said, noting that Jesus used the verb “to abide,” also sometimes translated as “to remain,” seven times in the Gospel reading.
Francis said to abide or remain in Jesus is not a passive activity, “letting oneself be lulled by life,” but an active and reciprocal action: “We abide in Jesus and Jesus abides in us.”
“How can we do this?” he said. “Jesus says to us: ‘If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.'”
“The fruitfulness of our life depends on prayer,” he stated, explaining that in prayer we can ask Jesus for the gift of seeing the world with his eyes.
This way, he said, we can “love our brothers and sisters, starting from the poorest and those who suffer the most, as he did, and to love them with his heart and to bring to the world fruits of goodness, fruits of charity, and fruits of peace.”
Pope Francis explained that first of all, we need the Lord. Before we can follow God’s commandments, before we can live the beatitudes, and perform works of mercy, “it is necessary to be joined to him, to abide in him.”
“We cannot be good Christians if we do not abide in Jesus. And yet with him, we can do everything,” he underlined. “With him we can do everything.”
“Let us entrust ourselves to the intercession of the Virgin Mary,” he concluded. “She remained fully united to Jesus and bore much fruit. May she help us abide in Christ, in his love, in his word, to bear witness in the world to the Risen Lord.”
At the end of the Regina caeli, Pope Francis sent his good wishes to Christians of the Orthodox Church and Eastern and Latin Catholic Churches, who celebrate Easter according to the Julian calendar, which falls this year on May 2.
“May the risen Lord fill them with light and peace, and comfort the communities living in particularly difficult situations. Happy Easter to them!” he said.
The pope also referenced the ongoing situation in Burma, where security forces have opened fire on people protesting the military coup, resulting in injuries and deaths.
He said the Church in Burma is encouraging everyone to devote one Hail Mary of their daily rosary during the month of May for peace in Burma.
“Each of us turns to our mother when he or she is in need or in difficulty,” he said. “We, this month, ask our Heavenly Mother to speak to the hearts of all those responsible in Myanmar, so that they may find the courage to walk the path of encounter, reconciliation and peace.”
Pope Francis also expressed his closeness to the people of Israel, where crowds at a Jewish religious festival on Mount Maron led to a crush of people resulting in 45 deaths and some 150 injuries the night of April 29 to April 30.
“I assure my remembrance in prayer for the victims of this tragedy and their families,” he said.
Francis also mentioned the example of Bl. José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros, who was beatified in Caracas, Venezuela on April 30.
“He was a doctor, rich in science and faith. He was able to recognize the face of Christ in the sick and, as a good Samaritan, he helped them with evangelical charity. May his example help us to take care of those who suffer in body and spirit,” he said, encouraging a round of applause for the new blessed.
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A most interesting dialogue. Sounds like a book worth reading.
Agreed, dear Deacon Edward Peitler: a very interesting discussion between dear Carl & dear Larry, around Larry’s new book.
SO much relevant dogmatic territory covered in a short time. Yet, spiritually the conversants seemed like a couple of healthy-looking fish in a landing-net, flipping & flapping, gasping for water. Highly erudite & very galvanized but with no actual hope!
? Where is The Living Water of The Holy Spirit that always overflows every life lived in wholehearted praise & worship of God Incarnate in our glorious Christ Jesus.
Sing along with this, and you’ll understand the joy that bears evidence to hope! Many people break out in holy tears when worshipping with this.
Raise A Hallelujah | Martin Smith & Elle Limebear w/St Peters Church | Gloworks TV – YouTube
After all the bad news they analyzed so well, Larry’s good news for Catholic couples was that having many children is the ‘radically cruciform kenotic’ way for the Church to get out of the cul-de-sac of godless, postmodern attitudes. Goodness me!
“It is The Holy Spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer.” John 6:63
I totally appreciate & admire Carl & Larry. They are manfully & perseveringly responding to the present, Goliath-like, gross diminishment in Catholic Christianity, yet they seemed to much underrate The One Thing that counts.
Ask, and you will be given.
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will The Heavenly Father give The Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” Luke 11:13
In the Easter season now, all our daily Holy Masses have readings from The Acts of The Apostles, lauding the power of The Holy Spirit to enable us to overcome even the worst ungodly opposition.
Let’s pray for the hearts of all Catholics to engage in bold worship and cry out expectantly for more of the beloved Holy Spirit’s Living Water, as Jesus taught us.
Ever in the love of The Lamb; blessings from marty
A warning that impacts terribly is, Not all who call out Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven! Chapp’s absence of plausibility for belief in mod culture is a spiritual deadening reality affecting modern worship. Worship becoming social convention. Transcendence to ‘pure’ immanence. Indeed, fired by absorption with the material our spiritual demise.
Challenging idolatries is located by Chapp in practical cruciform means having more children for example. Kenosis, the deep entering into Christ really means crucifixion. Agreed, that in our mod society the break with idolatry in all its forms is the Cross. We must take that radical step. That has always been moral dogma. What makes it seem astounding today is that we’ve distanced ourselves so far from Christ.
Additionally: Variations on a theme by Larry Chapp.
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people, so that you proclaim his goodness, who called you out of darkness into his own wonderful light (1 Peter 2: 9). Peter recognized a mystery of our calling to a life of virtue. He, among the Apostles, identifies the common priesthood of the faithful. Baptism traditionally included anointing on the head with chrism. Chrism is used in Confirmation, and anointing of the hands of the newly ordained priest. The tradition of priesthood, its charisma priest, prophet, and king was retained liturgically though not entirely in practice. Except for the saints. The cross was their means to sanctity.
Paul the Apostle also references the centrality of the cross in realization of the Body of Christ in the world. That his ‘joyful’ suffering fulfills what is lacking in the suffering of Christ (Col 1:4). That is our mission, priest and laity, to assume the cross in virtue of our state of life ‘for sake of his [Christ’s] bride, the Church’. While the Church is in the world the Mystical Body of Christ continues its Crucifixion in us.
Ecclesia, the gathering of the faithful finds its perfection and sanctification in the suffering that is the Cross. Why suffering? A question tortuously questioned by CS Lewis, is that suffering purifies love, the removal of the dross. Those satisfactions and pleasures that make the effort an indulgence rather than a gift.
A couple of supportive footnotes and a question:
For our modern crisis, Chapp used the term “tsunami.” Whatever one thinks about Cardinal WUERL, whether accurate or not, he used this term in Rome in 2012 to initiate the Year of Faith: “It is as if a tsunami of secular influence has swept across the cultural landscape, taking with it such societal markers as marriage, family, the concept of the common good and objective right and wrong.”
Chapp also defines modernity as “no longer capable of thinking about God.” BERNANOS, whom he also mentions, specifically had this to say about that: “The modern world will shortly no longer possess sufficient spiritual reserves to commit genuine evil. Already . . . we can witness a lethal slackening of men’s conscience that is attacking not only their moral life, but also their very heart and mind, altering and decomposing even their imagination . . . The menacing crisis is one of infantilism” (Interview with Samedi-Soir, Nov. 8, 1947, cited in Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence,” Ignatius, 1996, p. 457).
Of Christ being reduced to “sprinkles on top of ice-cream modernity,” even Thomas CARLYLE (1795-1881) got it just about right: “If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and then make fun of it.”
A QUESTION: Looking beyond the internal crisis of the West, and from Chapp the need to first understand the radical nihilist’s mindset even better than he does, a parallel case for empathy can be made about external and invasive ISLAM (a complex deviation into natural religion).
Islam adheres to (a) a rudimentary notion of innate natural law from before all history (“the germ of Islam,” which it mistakes for Qur’anic “revelation”) and to (b) a pre-Christian, fatalistic orientation toward a transcendent, inscrutable and arbitrary Allah (stripped of the self-disclosing LOGOS). In parallel (?), does Chapp’s engagement with vacuous modernity involve an appeal to, say, interior conscience where it still survives, and to the transcendent Other who accounts not only for the intelligibility of the cosmos, but for the very existence (!) of stuff—ex nihilo?
How to crack modernity as ancient monism armed with a computer?
So, does God permit Islam to hang around (not a “pluralism” of equivalent religions), ironically, as a reminder to a post-Christian West of both undeniable natural law and undeniable transcendence—which, together, have a name and a face? Jesus Christ, more than a fading episode on the trajectory toward modernity (C.S. Lewis’ “chronological snobbery”), but the always central event in all of fully human history?
As Chapp puts it, the “cruciform” vertical into the horizontal.