Vatican
City, 18 March, 2015 (VIS) – Having examined the various members of
family life—mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents—the
Pope concluded this first section of catechesis on the family by
talking about children. Today he focused on what a great gift
children are for humanity, and next week he will speak about wounds
that damage childhood.
Interrupted
by the applause of the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square when
he affirmed that “children are a gift to humanity”, Pope Francis
thanked them and exclaimed: “but they are also a greatly excluded
one because they are even not allowed to be born…a society can be
judged, not only morally but also sociologically, on how it treats
its children, if it is a free society or a slave society of
international interests.”
Then,
continuing with his catechesis he explained that “firstly, children
remind us that we all, in the first years of life, are totally
dependent on the care and kindness of others. The Son of God,” he
emphasized, “was not spared this step. This is the mystery that we
contemplate every year at Christmastime. The manger scene is the icon
that communicates this reality in the most simple and direct way.”
“God,”
he continued, “has no difficulty in being understood by children
and children have no trouble in understanding God. It isn’t by
chance that in the Gospels Jesus speaks beautiful and strong words
about the ‘little ones’. This term indicates all persons who
depend on the help of others, particularly children. …Children,
therefore, are a treasure for humanity and also for the Church
because they constantly remind us of the necessary condition for
entering into the Kingdom of God: that we must not consider ourselves
self-sufficient, but in need of help, of love, and of forgiveness.”
Children
also remind us that we are always children even when we become adults
or if we become parents; beneath it all we keep our identity as a
child. “And this always leads us back to the fact that we are not
given life, but that we have received it,” the Pope reminded. “The
great gift of life is the first gift we have received. Sometimes we
risk forgetting about this, as if we were the masters of our
existence while instead we are radically dependent. In fact, it is a
source of great joy to hear that at every age in life, in every
situation, in every social condition, we are and remain sons and
daughters. This is the main message that children give us with their
presence: with just their presence they remind us that each and every
one of us is a child.”
Listing
some of the other gifts that children bring to humanity the Pope
highlighted their way of seeing reality, “with a confident and pure
gaze. Children have a spontaneous trust in mom and dad and they have
a spontaneous trust in God, in Jesus, and in the Madonna. At the same
time, their inner gaze is pure, not yet tainted by malice, duplicity,
and the ‘incrustation’ of life that harden one’s heart. We know
that even children have original sin, that they can be selfish, but
they retain a purity and an inner simplicity. Children are not
diplomats: they say what they feel, they say what they see, directly.
And many times they make parents uncomfortable, saying in front of
other people: ‘I don’t like this because it’s ugly.’ But
children say what they see. They aren’t split persons; they still
haven’t learned that science of duplicity that we adults have
unfortunately learned.”
Children
also bring with them ability to receive and to give affection.
“Tenderness is having a heart ‘of flesh’ and not ‘of stone’,
as the Bible says,” Pope Francis noted. “Tenderness is also
poetry. It is ‘feeling’ things and events, not treating them as
mere objects only to use them because they they’re useful.”
The
ability to smile and to cry is another gift that children bring, one
which “we grown-ups often ‘block out’… Many times our smile
becomes a cardboard one, something lifeless and cold or even an
artificial, clown’s smile. Children smile and cry spontaneously. It
always comes from the heart, and often our hearts are closed and we
lose this ability to smile and to cry. Children, then, can teach us
how to smile and how to cry again. … This is why Jesus invites his
disciples to ‘become like children’ because ‘the kingdom of God
belongs to such as these’.”
“Children
bring life, joy, hope, even troubles. But life is like that. They
certainly also bring worries and, at times, many problems. But a
society with these worries and problems is a better one than a
society that is sad and gray because it is childless! And when we see
a society with a birthrate of just 1%,” he concluded, “we can say
that that is a sad and gray society because it is without children.”
On
greeting pilgrims from English-speaking countries, the Pope was
warmly hailed by students from The Catholic University of America and
Loyola University Maryland who are studying in Rome for the semester