“We dedicate today’s catechesis to a work
of mercy that we all know very well, but perhaps do not put into
practice as we should: bearing patiently those who wrong us”, said Pope
Francis to the thousands of faithful gathered in
a sunny but chilly St. Peter’s Square during this week’s Wednesday
general audience.
“We are all very good at identifying the
presence of a person who is bothersome: it happens when we meet someone
in the street, or when we receive a telephone call. Immediately we
think, ‘For how long must I listen to the complaints,
gossip, requests or bragging of this person?’ At times, it may be that
annoying people are those closest to us: among our relatives there is
always one; they are not lacking in the workplace; and even in our spare
time we are not free of them”.
“What must we do with these people?”
asked the Holy Father, without neglecting to mention that we too can be
bothersome to others. He went on to explain why patiently bearing those
who wrong us appears among the spiritual works of
mercy.
“In the Bible we see that God Himself
must use mercy to suffer the complaints of His people”, he said. “For
example, in the Book of Exodus the people are truly unbearable: first
they weep because they are enslaved in Egypt, and
God frees them; then in the desert they complain because there is
nothing to eat, and God sends them quails and manna, but in spite of
this the complaints do not cease. Moses acts as a mediator between God
and His people, and he too at times is bothersome
to the Lord. But God was patient and in this way He taught Moses and
His people also this essential dimension of faith”.
“A first question therefore comes to us
spontaneously”, he added. “Do we ever carry out an examination of
conscience, to ask ourselves whether or not we too, at times, can be
annoying to others? It is easy to point the finger at
the defects and shortcomings of others, but we should learn to put
ourselves in other people’s shoes. Let us look above all at Jesus: how
much patience He had to have during the three years of His public life!
Once, while He was walking with His disciples,
He was stopped by the mother of James and John, who said to Him,
‘Promise that in your kingdom these two sons of mine will sit on your
right and on your left’. Even in that situation, Jesus took the
opportunity to give a fundamental teaching: His is not a
kingdom of power and glory like earthly ones, but rather of service and
giving to others. Jesus teaches always to go towards the essential and
to look further ahead, to assume one’s mission with responsibility”.
The situation narrated in the Gospel of
Matthew relates to another two works of spiritual mercy: admonishing
sinners and instructing the ignorant. “Let us think of the great effort
it takes when we help people to grow in faith
and in life. I think, for example, of catechists – among whom there are
many mothers and women religious – who dedicate time to teaching
children the basic elements of faith. How much effort, especially when
the children would prefer to play instead of listening
to the catechism!”.
“Accompanying in the search for the
essential is good and important, as it lets us share in the joy of
tasting the meaning of life. Often it happens that we meet people who
dwell on superficial things, ephemeral and banal; at times
they have not met anyone to stimulate them to look for something else,
to appreciate the true treasures. Teaching to look to the essential is a
decisive help, especially in a time like our own, which seems to have
lost its bearings and pursues short-sighted
satisfactions. Teaching to discover what the Lord wants from us and how
we can respond to it means setting out on the road to grow in our own
vocation, the road of true joy”.
“So, Jesus’ words to the mother of James
and John, and then to all the group of disciples, indicate the way to
avoid so as not to fall into the trap of envy, ambition and adulation,
temptations that are always lurking even amongst
us Christians. The need to advise, admonish and instruct must not make
us feel superior to others, but obliges us first and foremost to look
inwardly at ourselves to check that we are consistent with what we ask
of others. Let us not forget Jesus’ words: ‘Why
do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice
the log that is in your own eye?’. He concluded, “May the Holy Spirit
help us be patient in bearing others, and humble and simple in giving
counsel”.
Below is the Vatican-provided
transcription of the video message Pope Francis sent yesterday to
the the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on Tuesday
during their annual fall General Assembly regarding the Fifth
National Hispanic Pastoral Encuentro, which will take place in dioceses
of the United States from January 2017 to September of 2018:
***
Dear Brother Bishops,
I am pleased to have this opportunity to
speak to you. Just a year ago, I was with you during my Pastoral Visit
to the United States. There I was impressed by the vitality and
diversity of the Catholic community. Throughout its
history, the Church in your country has welcomed and integrated new
waves of immigrants. In the rich variety of their languages and cultural
traditions, they have shaped the changing face of the American Church.
In this context, I would commend the coming Fifth National Hispanic Pastoral
Encuentro. The celebration of this Fifth Encuentro will begin in your Dioceses in this coming January and conclude with a national celebration in September 2018.
In continuity with its predecessors, the Encuentro
seeks to acknowledge and value the specific gifts that Hispanic
Catholics have offered, and continue to offer, to the Church in your
country. But it is more than that. It
is part of a greater process of renewal and missionary outreach, one to
which all of your local Churches are called.
Our great challenge is to create a
culture of encounter, which encourages individuals and groups to share
the richness of their traditions and experiences, to break down walls
and to build bridges. The Church in America, as elsewhere,
is called to “go out” from its comfort zone and to be a leaven of
communion. Communion among ourselves, with our fellow Christians, and
with all who seek a future of hope.
We need to become ever more fully a
community of missionary disciples, filled with love of the Lord Jesus
and enthusiasm for the spread of the Gospel. The Christian community is
meant to be a sign and prophecy of God’s plan for
the entire human family. We are called to be bearers of good news for a
society gripped by disconcerting social, cultural and spiritual shifts,
and increasing polarization.
It is my hope that the Church in your country, at every level, will accompany the
Encuentro with its own reflection and pastoral discernment. In a
particular way, I ask you to consider how your local Churches can best
respond to the growing presence, gifts and potential of the Hispanic
community. Mindful of the contribution that the
Hispanic community makes to the life of the nation, I pray that the Encuentro
will bear fruit for the renewal of American society and for the Church’s apostolate in the United States.
With gratitude to all engaged in the preparation of the Fifth
Encuentro, I assure you of my prayers for this important
initiative of your Conference. Commending you, and the clergy, religious
and lay faithful of your local Churches, to the prayers of Mary
Immaculate, I cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing as
a pledge of grace and peace in the Lord.
Posted by Bishop Robert Barron on 16 November, 2016
I’m in the process of re-reading a spiritual classic from the Russian Orthodox tradition:
The Way of a Pilgrim.
This little text, whose author is unknown to us, concerns a man from
mid-19th century Russia
who found himself deeply puzzled by St. Paul’s comment in first
Thessalonians that we should “pray unceasingly.” How, he wondered,
amidst all of the demands of life, is this even possible? How could the
Apostle command something so patently absurd?
His botheration led him, finally, to a
monastery and a conversation with an elderly spiritual teacher who
revealed the secret. He taught the man the simple prayer that stands at
the heart of the Eastern Christian mystical tradition,
the so-called “Jesus prayer.” “As you breathe in,” he told him, say,
‘Lord Jesus Christ,’ and as you breathe out, say, ‘Have mercy on me.’”
When the searcher looked at him with some puzzlement, the elder
instructed him to go back to his room and pray these
words a thousand times. When the younger man returned and announced his
successful completion of the task, he was told, “Now go pray it ten
thousand times!” This was the manner in which the spiritual master was
placing this prayer on the student’s lips so
that it might enter his heart and into the rhythm of his breathing in
and out, and finally become so second nature to him that he was,
consciously or unconsciously, praying it all the time, indeed praying
just as St. Paul had instructed the Thessalonians.
In the power of the Spirit, the young man
then set out to wander through the Russian forests and plains, the
Jesus prayer perpetually on his lips. The only object of value that he
had in his rucksack was the Bible, and with the
last two rubles in his possession, he purchased a beat-up copy of the Philokalia,
a collection of prayers and sayings from the Eastern Orthodox
tradition. Sleeping outdoors, fending largely for himself, relying
occasionally on the kindness of strangers,
reading his books and praying his prayer, he made his way. One day, two
deserters from the Russian army accosted him on the road, beat him
unconscious and stole his two treasures. When he came around and
discovered his loss, the man was devastated and wept
openly: how could he go on without food for his soul? Through a
fortuitous set of circumstances, he managed to recover his lost
possessions, and when he had them once again, he hugged them to his
chest, gripping them so hard that his fingers practically locked
in place around them.
I
would invite you to stay with that image for a moment. We see a man
with no wealth, no power, no influence in society, no fame to speak of,
practically no physical possessions—but clinging with all of his might
and with fierce
protectiveness to two things whose sole purpose is to feed his soul.
Here’s my question for you: What would you cling to in such a way? What
precisely is it, the loss of which would produce in you a kind of panic?
What would make you cry, once you realized
that you no longer had it? And to make the questions more pointed,
let’s assume that you were on a desert island or that you, like the
Russian pilgrim, had no resources to go out and buy a replacement. Would
it be your car? Your home? Your golf clubs? Your
computer? To be honest, I think for me it might be my iPhone. If
suddenly I lost my ability to make a call, my contacts, my music, my
GPS, my maps, my email, etc., I would panic—and I would probably cry for
sheer joy once I had the phone back, and my fingers
would close around it like a claw. What makes this confession more than
a little troubling is that, 10 years ago, I didn’t even own a cell
phone. I lived my life perfectly well without it, and if you had told me
then that I would never have one, it wouldn’t
have bothered me a bit.
What
I particularly love about the Pilgrim is that he was preoccupied, not
about any of the passing, evanescent goods of the world, but rather
about prayer, about a sustained contact with the eternal God. He didn’t
care about the
things that obsess most of us most of the time: money, power, fame,
success. And the only possessions that concerned him were those simple
books that fed his relationship to God. Or to turn it around, he wasn’t
frightened by the loss of any finite good; but
he was frightened to death at the prospect of losing his contact with
the living God.
So what would you cling to like a desperate animal? What loss would you fear? What do you ultimately love?
As
next Sunday, 20 November, is Universal Children’s Day, dedicated to
promoting the rights of the child, Pope Francis today launched an appeal
“to the conscience of all, institutions and families, that children
always be protected
and their wellbeing safeguarded, so that they never fall prey to forms
of slavery, recruitment for armed groups, and maltreatment.”
The Pope offered this appeal at the end of the weekly general audience.
“I
hope that the international community may watch over their lives,
guaranteeing to every boy and girl that right to schooling and
education, so that they may grow in serenity and look with trust to the
future.”
Pope Francis today concluded his general audience with the traditional greetings to various groups.
In his closing comments, he noted that in this month of November, “the liturgy invites us to pray for the deceased.”
“Let us not forget those who have loved
us and have preceded us in faith, and also those whom no-one remembers;
the Eucharistic celebration is the best spiritual aid we can offer to
their souls,” he said.
The Pope also made particular reference to the victims of the recent earthquake in Central Italy.
“Let us pray for them and for their families, and continue to express our solidarity with those who have suffered damages.”
Bishop Douglas
Crosby of Hamilton, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic
Bishops, has signed a joint ecumenical and interfaith letter with a
number of other religious leaders in Canada, as well as representatives
from
various religious agencies working in the areas of ecumenism or social
justice.
The
joint letter conveys prayers and support for the Canadian participants
at the 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22) taking place in
Marrakech, Morocco, November 7-18, 2016. The letter was sent to the
Minister of Environment and Climate Change, the Honorable Catherine
McKenna, who is leading the Canadian delegation. In their letter, the
religious leaders state that “religions can truly
contribute to building up a safer, healthier and more just society. We
thus take to heart this Conference’s deliberations and wish to applaud
all the conscientious and selfless efforts that are being made on behalf
of the world community, the good of every
human person, and the gift of creation itself. ”
Pope
Francis likewise sent a message to the Marrakech participants. In it
the Holy Father states that “The current situation of environmental
degradation … challenges us all, each of us with our own roles and
competencies, and
brings us together here with a renewed sense of awareness and
responsibility.”
Earlier,
participants in a symposium organized by the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences issued a statement in anticipation of the Marrakech Conference,
highlighting its connection with Laudato Si’, the Encyclical
Letter of
Pope Francis on care for our common home. The Canadian Council of
Churches (CCC) also published in 2015 various statements and letters
regarding climate change and care for creation. The President of the
CCCB was among the signatories of a declaration entitled
“On Promoting Climate Justice and Ending Poverty in Canada – Faith
Communities in Canada Speak Out”, published in September 2015.
Here
is a ZENIT working translation of Pope Francis’ prepared address during
this morning’s General Audience in St. Peter’s Square.
***
Dear Brothers and Sisters, good morning!
We
dedicate today’s catechesis to a work of mercy that we all know very
well, but that perhaps we do not put into practice as we should:
to endure patiently people who annoy us. We are all very good
in identifying a presence that can annoy us: it happens when we meet
someone on the street, or when we receive a phone call … We immediately
think: “How long will I have to hear the complaints,
the gossip, the requests or the boasts of this person?” It also happens
some times that annoying persons are those closest to us: among
relatives there is always one; they are not lacking in the workplace and
not even in free time are we exempted. What should
we do with annoying persons? But we also many times are annoying to
others. Why has this also been inserted among the works of mercy?
To endure patiently people who annoy us?
In the Bible, we see that God Himself
must exercise mercy to endure the complaints of His people. For
instance, in the Book of Exodus the people are truly unbearable: first
they weep because they are slaves in Egypt, and God delivers
them; then, in the desert, they complain because there is nothing to
eat (cf. 16:3), and God sends quails and manna (cf. 16:13-16), yet
despite this, the complaints do not cease. Moses was the mediator
between God and the people, and sometimes the Lord also
annoyed him. However, God had patience and thus He also taught Moses
and the people this essential dimension of faith.
Then a first question comes
spontaneously: do we ever make an examination of conscience to see if we
also, sometimes, are annoying to others? It is easy to point the finger
at the defects and lacks of others, but we should learn
to put ourselves in others’ shoes.
We look above all at Jesus: how much
patience He had to have during the three years of His public life! Once,
when He was walking with His disciples, he was stopped by the mother of
James and John, who said to Him: “Command that
these two sons of mine sit, one at your right and the other at your
left, in your kingdom” (Matthew
20:21). The mother was lobbying for her sons, but she was the mother …
Jesus takes that situation also as a
starting point to give a fundamental teaching: His is not a kingdom of
power and glory as the earthly ones, but of service and donation to
others. Jesus teaches to go always to the essential
and to look beyond to assume one’s mission with responsibility. We can
see here the recalling to two other works of spiritual mercy: to
admonish sinners and to teach the ignorant. We think
of the great commitment we can give when we help people to grow in faith
and in life. I am thinking, for instance, of catechists – among whom
there are so many mothers and so many women
religious – who dedicate time to teach youngsters the basic elements of
the faith. How much effort, especially when youngsters prefer to play
rather than to listen to the catechism!
It
is good and important to accompany in the search
for the essential, because it makes us share the joy of relishing the
meaning of life. It often happens that we meet persons who stop at
superficial, ephemeral and
trivial things, sometimes because they have not met someone who would
stimulate them to seek something else, to appreciate the true treasures.
To teach to look at the essential is a determinant help, especially in a
time like ours, which seems to have lost
the way and chases short-term satisfactions. To teach to discover what
the Lord wants from us, and how we can correspond to Him, means to set
out on the way to grow in one’s vocation, the way of true joy. Thus were
Jesus’ words to the mother of James and John,
and then to the whole group of the disciples, indicating the way to
avoid falling into envy, ambition and adulation, temptations that are
always lurking also among us Christians. The need to counsel, admonish
and teach must not make us feel superior to others,
but obliges us first of all to enter within ourselves to verify if we
are coherent with all that we ask of others. Let us not forget Jesus’
words: “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not
perceive the wooden beam in your own? (Luke
6:41).” May the Holy Spirit help us to be patient in enduring and humble and simple in counseling.
[Original text: Italian] [Working Translation by ZENIT]
In Italian
A warm welcome goes to the
Italian-speaking pilgrims. I greet the Masters of Work Federation, which
is observing the sixtieth anniversary of its foundation and I hope that
the occasion will contribute to foster social and economic
inclusion, especially of the weakest sectors of the population.
I greet the Sons of God Community of
Florence; the Red Cross of Spoltore; the “Christmas Oranges” Association
of Camisano Vicentino; the parish groups and the students. In the
imminence of the end of the Extraordinary Jubilee may
each one remember how important it is to be merciful as the Father and may love for brothers make us more human and more Christian.
A special greeting goes to young people,
the sick and newlyweds. In the month of November, the liturgy invites us
to pray for the deceased. Let us not forget how much they loved us;
they have preceded us in faith, as well as those
that no one remembers: the suffrage in the Eucharistic Celebration is
the best spiritual help that we can offer their souls. We remember with
particular affection the victims of the recent earthquake in Central
Italy: we pray for them and for their relatives
and we continue to be solidaristic with all those who have suffered
damages.
The Holy Father’s Appeal
This coming Sunday, November 20th, the International Day of the Rights of Childhood and Adolescence
will be observed. I appeal to the conscience of all, institutions
and families, may children and their wellbeing always be protected, so
that they never fall into forms of slavery, are recruited into armed
groups and mistreated. I hope that the International
Community will watch over their life, guaranteeing to every boy and
girl the right to school and to education, so that their growth is
serene and they look at the future with confidence.
[Original text: Italian] [Working Translation by ZENIT]
Here is the Vatican-provided English-language summary of Pope Francis’ General Audience this morning in St. Peter’s Square:
***
Speaker: Dear Brothers and Sisters: In our catechesis for this Holy Year of Mercy, we now consider the spiritual work of mercy which is
bearing wrongs patiently. In showing patience to those who wrong
us and, by extension, to those we find irritating, we imitate God’s own
patience with us sinners. Exercising patience with others also
challenges us to reflect on our own conduct and failings.
Patience is also required in two related spiritual works of mercy:
admonishing sinners and instructing the ignorant. We think of the
patience shown by the many parents, catechists and teachers who quietly
help young people to grow in faith and knowledge of
the important things in life. Helping others to look past the
ephemeral, to discover the Lord’s will in their lives and thus to find
lasting joy, is a great act of charity. By serving our brothers and
sisters in this way, our own minds and hearts are purified
and renewed. May the Holy Spirit grant us the generosity and patience
needed to support and encourage those around us, so that together we may
cherish the things that truly matter
Speaker: I
greet the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors taking part in today’s
Audience, particularly those from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark,
Iceland, Malta, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malysia, the Philippines, New
Zealand,
Canada and the United States of America. With prayerful good wishes
that these final days of the Jubilee of Mercy will be a moment of grace
and spiritual renewal for you and your families, I invoke upon all of
you joy and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ.
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