Vatican City, 27 March 2014 (VIS) –
The dialogue between God's lament and man's justifications was the
theme selected by the Holy Father in the homily he pronounced at this
morning's Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, attended by Italian ministers
and members of parliament. Pope Francis spoke about the infidelity of
the People of God, a generation that does not accept His messages,
and in their place, seek justifications for their sins. “It was a
very great task to drive idolatry from the hearts of his people, to
make them docile to His Word. But they followed this route for a
little while, before turning back”.
“From being sinners, they went on to
become corrupt”, he continued. “It is very hard for a corrupt
person to turn back. The sinner, yes, because the Lord is merciful
and awaits us all. But the corrupt are fixed on their affairs, and
these people were corrupt. They therefore sought to justify
themselves, because Jesus, with his simplicity, but with his strength
in God, made trouble for them. And, step by step, they ended up
convincing themselves that they had to kill Jesus, and one of them
said, 'It is better for a man to die for the people'”.
“These people had taken the wrong
path. They resisted the salvation of the Lord's love, and drifted
from faith, from a theology of faith to a theology of duty: 'You must
do this, this and this …'”. Describing them as hypocrites, Jesus
said, “'They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other
people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a
finger to move them'. They rejected the Lord's love and this
rejection set them on a path that was not the dialectic of freedom
offered by the Lord, but that of the logic of necessity, where there
is no room for the Lord. … They have become 'behavioural': men of
good manners, but with bad habits. Jesus called them 'whitewashed
sepulchres'. This is the Lord's pain, God's pain, God's lament”.
Pope Francis mentioned that during Lent
“we would do well to think about the invitation from the Lord to
love, and to ask ourselves, all of us: am I on this path? Or do I
risk justifying myself and taking another path? A road with many
junctions that does not, however, lead to any promise. … And we
pray that the Lord gives us the grace to always follow the path of
salvation, to open ourselves to the salvation that comes only from
God, through faith, not that which is proposed to us by these
'professionals of duty' who had lost the faith and who led their
people with this pastoral theology of duty”.
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