Pope Francis on Our Lady of Lourdes feast: The Church is close to all who are sick or frail

Vatican City, Apr 20, 2020 / 03:40 am (CNA).- Freedom is found in the Holy Spirit who provides the strength to fulfill God’s will, Pope Francis said in his Monday morning Mass homily.

“Prayer is what opens the door to the Holy Spirit and gives us this freedom, this boldness, this courage of the Holy Spirit,” Pope Francis said in his homily April 20.

“May the Lord help us to always be open to the Holy Spirit because it will carry us forward in our life of service to the Lord,” the pope said.

Speaking from the chapel in his Vatican City residence, Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis explained that the early Christians were guided by the Holy Spirit, who provided them strength to pray with courage and boldness.

“Being a Christian is not just fulfilling the Commandments. They must be done, this is true, but if you stop there, you are not a good Christian. To be a good Christian is to let the Holy Spirit enter into you and take you, take you where he wants,” Pope Francis said according to a transcript by Vatican News.

The pope pointed to the Gospel account of an encounter between Nicodemus, a pharisee, and Jesus in which the pharisee asked: “How can a man once grown old be born again?”

To which Jesus replies in chapter three of the Gospel of John: “You must be born from above. The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Pope Francis said: “The definition of the Holy Spirit that Jesus gives here is interesting … unconstrained. A person who gets carried from both sides by the Holy Spirit: this is the freedom of the Spirit. And a person who does this is docile, and here we talk about docility to the Holy Spirit.”

“In our Christian life many times we stop like Nicodemus … we do not know what step to take, we do not know how to do it or we do not have faith in God to take this step and let the Spirit enter,” he said. “To be born again is to let the Spirit enter us.”

“With this freedom of the Holy Spirit you will never know where you will end up,” Francis said.

At the beginning of his morning Mass, Pope Francis prayed for men and women with a political calling who must make decisions during the coronavirus pandemic. He prayed that political parties in different countries may “seek together the good of the country and not the good of their party.”

“Politics is a high form of charity,” Pope Francis said.

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Vatican City, Dec 2, 2019 / 10:59 am (CNA).- Catholic business owners have both a grave responsibility and an opportunity to promote the Church’s social teaching in a difficult atmosphere, Pope Francis told young entrepreneurs Monday.

“I a… […]

Pope Francis kisses the crucifix at the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 7, 2023. / Vatican Media

Vatican City, Apr 7, 2023 / 12:00 pm (CNA).

At the Vatican’s Good Friday liturgy, the papal preacher warned against the danger of believers being drawn into the “vortex of nihilism” by the post-modern world’s “total relativism.”

Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap., compared Friedrich Nietzsche’s words “God is dead” with the Catholic Church’s proclamation of the death of Christ as he preached at the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion on April 7 in St. Peter’s Basilica in the presence of Pope Francis.

At the beginning of the liturgy, Pope Francis arrived at the basilica dressed in red vestments in a wheelchair. Unlike in previous years, he was unable to lay prostrate but spent a moment in silent prayer before the main altar at the beginning of the liturgy.

The Vatican announced earlier in the day that the 86-year-old pope, who was hospitalized with bronchitis last week, will not be attending the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum on Friday night due to cold weather.

In his homily, Cantalamessa noted that the Catholic Church has proclaimed the death of Christ for 2,000 years. He said: “At every Mass, after the consecration, we say or sing: ‘We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.’”

“Yet another ‘death of God’ has been proclaimed for a century and a half in our de-Christianized Western world. When, among cultivated people, one speaks of the ‘death of God,’ it is this other death of God – ideological and rather than historical – that is meant. To keep up with the times, some theologians hastened to build a theology around it: ‘The theology of the death of God.’”

“We cannot pretend to ignore the existence of this different narrative, without leaving prey to suspicion many believers,” he added.

Cantalamessa, who was made a cardinal in 2020 in recognition of his more than 40 years as Preacher of the Papal Household, said that he chose to speak about this topic “to keep believers – who knows, perhaps even just one or two university students – from being drawn into this vortex of nihilism which is the true ‘black hole’ of the spiritual universe.”

With relativism in the fields of ethics, philosophy, art, and religion, “nothing more is solid; everything is liquid, or even vaporous,” the cardinal said.

“As believers, it is our duty to show what there is behind, or underneath, that proclamation, namely the flicker of an ancient flame, the sudden eruption of a volcano that has never been extinguished since the beginning of the world,” he said.

After the homily, a deacon and Pope Francis read the 11 Good Friday Solemn Intercessions, which included prayers for the Jewish people, those who do not believe in God, and those suffering from war.

The Adoration of the Cross then took place, followed by the recitation of the Our Father and Holy Communion. Pope Francis kissed the crucifix after spending a moment in silent adoration standing at the foot of the cross.

During his homily, Cantalamessa urged Christians to heed a warning from Dante Alighieri, who wrote in the Divine Comedy: “‘Christians, be ye more serious in your movements; Be ye not like a feather at each wind, And think not every water washes you.’”

The cardinal said: “Let us, therefore, continue to repeat, with heartfelt gratitude and more convinced than ever, the words we proclaim at every Mass: ‘We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.’”

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