Vatican City, 5 March 2014 (VIS) –
This morning the Holy Father celebrated the general audience with
30,000 faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square. Pope Francis
dedicated this Ash Wednesday's catechesis to the Lenten journey of
forty days that leads us to the Easter Triduum, and recalled the two
suggestions offered to us by the Church in this period: to be more
aware of the redemptive work of Christ, and to live our Baptism in a
more committed way.
“The awareness of the wonders that
the Lord carried out for our salvation should lead our minds and
hearts to gratitude to God”, he said, and added, “Fully living
out our Baptism – and this is the second invitation – means not
becoming inured to the situations of degradation and poverty that we
encounter when walking the streets of our cities and towns. There is
the risk of passively accepting certain types of behaviour and of not
marvelling at the sad realities that surround us. We grow accustomed
to violence, as if it were a normal part of our daily news; we get
used to seeing our brothers and sisters sleeping in the streets, as
they have no roof to shelter them. We are used to refugees who search
of freedom and dignity, but are not received as they should be. We
get used to living in a society that claims to be able to do without
God, in which parents do not teach their children how to pray or how
to make the sign of the Cross. This inurement to forms of behaviour
that are not Christian, that are the easy way, anaesthetise the
heart!” He asked the faithful present, “Do your children know how
to make the sign of the Cross? Do they know how to pray the Our
Father or the Hail Mary?”.
Francis explained that Lent comes to us
“as a Providential moment for changing our route, for recovering
our capacity to react when faced with the realities of evil that
always challenge us. Lent should be lived as a time of conversion, of
renewal at personal and community levels by drawing closer to God and
through trusting adhesion to the Gospel. In this way, we are able to
look upon our brothers and their needs with new eyes”.
The Pope remarked that this moment is
“favourable for converting to love for one's neighbour; a love that
assumes the gratitude and mercy of the Lord Who made himself poor so
that by his poverty we might become rich, and invited all to “invoke
with particular trust the protection and help of the Virgin Mary, so
that she, the first believer in Christ, might accompany us in days of
intense and penitential prayer, to allow us to celebrate, purified
and renewed in spirit, the great Paschal mystery of her Son”.
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