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Vatican City, Mar 10, 2017 / 05:15 am (CNA/EWTN News).- After spending a week in Ariccia with members of the Curia for their annual Lenten spiritual exercises, Pope Francis returned to the Vatican Friday with words of gratitude and his own brief reflection.

Shortly before leaving the Casa Divin Maestro retreat house in Ariccia, the Pope voiced his gratitude to Franciscan priest Giulio Michelini, who led the meditations for the week, saying “I want to thank you for the good you have wished us to have and for the good you have done us.”

He thanked the friar first of all for his openness and for being “natural” during the preaching, sharing himself “without artifice.”

Francis also gave thanks for all of the work Michelini put into preparing the meditations. “It’s true, there is a mountain of things to meditate on,” he said, but noted that as St. Ignatius says in the Exercises, when one encounters feelings of consolation or desolation, you must “stop there” to meditate on it.

Surely everyone has found one or two things to deeply reflect on after hearing Fr. Michelini’s meditations this week, the Pope continued, saying the rest “will serve for another time.”

“Sometimes, the simplest words are the ones that help us, or the more complicated ones: to everyone, the Lord gives the right word,” he said.

Concluding his remarks, the Pope voiced his hope and prayer Fr. Michelini can “continue to work for the Church, in the Church, in teaching, in so many things that the Church entrusts to you. But above all, I wish you to be a good friar.”

Pope Francis returned to the Vatican Friday with members of the Roman Curia at the conclusion of their March 5-10 Lenten spiritual exercises. He began the tradition of leaving the Vatican for the retreat after his election, choosing instead to spend it in Ariccia, just a short ways outside of Rome.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”><a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/PopeFrancis?src=hash”>#PopeFrancis</a> is back from Ariccia after a week of <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/prayer?src=hash”>#prayer</a> &amp; reflection for <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/lent?src=hash”>#lent</a> – welcome back <a href=”https://twitter.com/Pontifex”>@Pontifex</a>! <a href=”https://t.co/L4kkuTkcIN”>pic.twitter.com/L4kkuTkcIN</a></p>&mdash; Elise Harris (@eharris_it) <a href=”https://twitter.com/eharris_it/status/840157590554255360″>March 10, 2017</a></blockquote>
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According to a Vatican communique, after offering the final March 10 Mass for Syria, the Pope and members of the Curia left, arriving back at the Vatican just before 11:30a.m.

At the conclusion of the Mass, Pope Francis sent 100,000 euro to the poor in Aleppo, thanks to a contribution from the Roman Curia.

For this year’s spiritual exercises, the Pope chose personally chose Fr. Michelini, a Franciscan of the Seraphic Province of the Friars Minor of Umbria, to do the preaching.

The meditations for each day were focused on the story of Christ’s Passion as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. Each day included two meditations, each on a different part of the story.

For example, reflecting on Jesus’ silence in the face of his accusers, Fr. Michelini spoke about the different kinds of silence: the good kind, such as silence in prayer and the bad kind, which is remaining silent in the face of wrongdoing, because we are worried what others will think of us.

Reflecting on Christ’s passion, Fr. Michelini in one meditation said, “I wonder if I have the courage to go all the way to follow Jesus Christ, taking into account that this brings to bear the cross.” As Jesus said, “‘if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.’”

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Vatican City, Jul 23, 2017 / 05:07 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Sunday Pope Francis said good and evil are often entwined, and that as sinners, we can’t label any one group or institution as bad, since we all face temptation and have the ability to choose which path to follow.

“The Lord, who is wisdom incarnate, today helps us to understand that good and evil cannot identify with definite territories or determined groups of people,” the Pope said July 23.

Jesus tells us that “the line between good and evil passes through the heart of every person. We are all sinners,” he said, and asked for anyone who is not a sinner to raise their hand – which no one did.
 
“We are all sinners!” he said, explaining that with his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ “has freed us from the slavery of sin and gives us the grace of walking in a new life.”

Pope Francis spoke to the crowd of pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square for his Sunday Angelus address, which this week focused on the day’s Gospel passage from Matthew, in which an enemy secretly plants weeds alongside the wheat in a master’s field.

The image, he said, shows us the good seed that is planted in the world by God, but also the bad seed planted by the devil in order to corrupt the good.

It not only speaks of the problem of evil, but also it also refers to God’s patience in the master, who allows the weeds to grow alongside the wheat, so that the harvest is not lost.

“With this image, Jesus tells us that in this world good and evil are totally entwined, that it’s impossible to separate them and weed out all the evil,” Pope Francis said, adding that “only God can do this, and he will do it in the final judgment.”

Instead, the parable represents “the field of the freedom of Christians,” who must make the difficult discernment between good and evil, choosing which one to follow.

This, the Pope said, involves trusting God and joining two seemingly contradictory attitudes: “decision and patience.”

Francis explained that “decision” in this case means “wanting to be good grain, with all of it’s strengths, and so to distance yourself from evil and it’s seductions.”

On the other hand, patience means “preferring a Church that is the leaven of the dough, which is not afraid to dirty her hands washing the feet of her children, rather than a Church of the ‘pure,’ which pretends to judge before it’s time who is in the Kingdom of God and who is not,” he said.

Both of these attitudes are necessary, he said, stressing that no one is perfect, but we are all sinners who have been redeemed by Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross.

Thanks to our baptism, Jesus has also given us the Sacrament of Confession, “ because we always need to be forgiven for our sins,” Francis said, adding that “to always look at the evil that is outside of us means not wanting to recognize the sin that is also within us.”

Jesus also teaches us a different way of looking at the world and observing reality, he said. In reflecting on the parable, we are invited to learn God’s timing and to see with his eyes, rather than focusing on our own, narrow vision.

“Thanks to the beneficial influence of an anxious waiting, what were weeds or seemed like weeds, can become a product of good,” he said, adding that this is “the prospect of hope!”

Pope Francis closed his address praying that Mary would intercede in helping us to observe in the world around us “not only dirtiness and evil, but also the good and beautiful; to expose the work of Satan, but above all to trust in the action of God who renders history fruitful.”

After leading pilgrims in the traditional Marian prayer, he voiced his sadness over “serious tensions and violence” in Jerusalem over the weekend, which have left seven people dead.

The deaths were the result of protests that were prompted by the placement of metal detectors at the entrance to the compound housing al-Aqsa mosque in the city, and have prompted world leaders to call for restraint on either side before the situation boils over.

Pope Francis invited pilgrims to join him in praying for a deescalation of the violence, and that “the Lord inspires in all proposals of reconciliation and peace.”

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Patriarch Bartholomew I, Pope Francis, and UNESCO’s Audrey Azoulay at Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University, Oct. 7, 2021. / Daniel Ibáñez/CNA.

Vatican City, Oct 7, 2021 / 05:00 am (CNA).
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