O'Higgins Park Mass: Full text of
Pope Francis' homily
Homily at the Mass for Peace and Justice
Pope Francis celebrates Mass in the O'Higgins Park in Santiago.- AFP |
APOSTOLIC VISIT OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
TO CHILE
TO CHILE
Homily at the Mass for Peace and Justice
Parque O’Higgins – Santiago
Parque O’Higgins – Santiago
Tuesday, 16 January 2017
“When Jesus saw the crowds…” (Mt 5:1). In
these first words of today’s Gospel we discover how Jesus wants to encounter
us, the way that God always surprises his people (cf. Ex 3:7).
The first thing Jesus does is to look out and see the faces of his
people. Those faces awaken God’s visceral love. Jesus’ heart was
not moved by ideas or concepts, but by faces, persons. By life calling
out for the Life that the Father wants to give us.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he saw the faces of his
followers, and what is most remarkable is that they, for their part, encounter
in the gaze of Jesus the echo of their longings and aspirations. This
encounter gives rise to the catalogue of the Beatitudes, that horizon towards which
we are called and challenged to set out. The Beatitudes are not the fruit
of passivity in the face of reality, nor of a mere onlooker gathering grim
statistics about current events. They are not the product of those
prophets of doom who seek only to spread dismay. Nor are they born of
those mirages that promise happiness with a single “click”, in the blink of an
eye. Rather, the Beatitudes are born of the compassionate heart of Jesus,
which encounters the hearts of men and women seeking and yearning for a life of
happiness. Men and women who know what it is to suffer, who appreciate
the confusion and pain of having the earth shake beneath their feet or seeing
dreams washed away when the work of a lifetime comes to nought. But men
and women who also know what it is to persevere and struggle to keep going,
what it is to rebuild their lives and to start again.
How much the heart of the Chilean people knows about
rebuilding and starting anew! How much you know about getting up again
after so many falls! That is the heart to which Jesus speaks; that is the
heart for which the Beatitudes are meant!
The Beatitudes are not the fruit of a hypercritical attitude
or the “cheap words” of those who think they know it all yet are unwilling to
commit themselves to anything or anyone, and thus end up preventing any chance
of generating processes of change and reconstruction in our communities and in
our lives. The Beatitudes are born of a merciful heart that never loses
hope. A heart that experiences hope as “a new day, a casting out of
inertia, a shaking off of weariness and negativity” (Pablo Neruda, El
habitante y su esperanza, 5).
Jesus, in proclaiming blessed the poor, the grieving, the
afflicted, the patient, the merciful… comes to cast out the
inertia which paralyzes those who no longer have faith in the
transforming power of God our Father and in their brothers and sisters,
especially the most vulnerable and outcast. Jesus, in proclaiming the
Beatitudes, shakes us out of that negativity, that sense of
resignation that makes us think we can have a better life if we escape from our
problems, shun others, hide within our comfortable existence, dulling our
senses with consumerism (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium,
2). The sense of resignation that tends to isolate us from others, to
divide and separate us, to blind us to life around us and to the suffering of
others.
The Beatitudes are that new day for all
those who look to the future, who continue to dream, who allow themselves to be
touched and sent forth by the Spirit of God.
How good it is for us to think that Jesus comes from the
mountain of Cierro Renca or Puntilla to say
to us: blessed, blessed indeed are you, and you, and you…. Blessed are
you if, moved by the Spirit of God, you struggle and work for that new
day, that new Chile, for yours will be the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9).
Against the resignation that like a negative undercurrent
undermines our deepest relationships and divides us, Jesus tells us: Blessed
are those who work for reconciliation. Blessed are those ready to dirty
their hands so that others can live in peace. Blessed are those who try
not to sow division. That is how the Beatitude teaches us to be
peacemakers. It asks us to try to make ever greater room for the spirit
of reconciliation in our midst. Do you want to be blessed? Do you
want to be happy? Blessed are those who work so that others can be
happy. Do you want peace? Then work for peace.
Here I cannot fail to mention Santiago’s great bishop, who
in a Te Deum once said: “If you want peace, work for
justice”… And if someone should ask us: “What is justice?” or whether
justice is only a matter of “not stealing”, we will tell them that there is
another kind of justice: the justice that demands that every man and woman be
treated as such” (Cardinal RAÚL SILVA HENRÍQUEZ, Homily at the
Ecumenical Te Deum, 18 September 1977).
To sow peace by nearness, closeness! By coming out of
our homes and looking at peoples’ faces, by going out of our way to meet
someone having a difficult time, someone who has not been treated as a person,
as a worthy son or daughter of this land. This is the only way we must
forge a future of peace, to weave a fabric that will not unravel. A
peacemaker knows that it is often necessary to overcome great or subtle faults
and ambitions born of the desire for power and to “gain a name for oneself”,
the desire to be important at the cost of others. A peacemaker knows that
it is not enough simply to say: “I am not hurting anybody”. As Saint
Alberto Hurtado used to say: “It is very good not to do wrong, but very bad not
to do good” (Meditación radial, April 1944).
Peacebuilding is a process that calls us together and
stimulates our creativity in fostering relationships where we see our neighbour
not as a stranger, unknown, but rather as a son and daughter of this land.
Let us commend ourselves to Mary Immaculate, who from Cerro
San Cristóbal watches over and accompanies this city. May she
help us to live and to desire the spirit of the Beatitudes, so that on every
corner of this city we will hear, like a gentle whisper: ““Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9).
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