Pope’s Lenten Message calls
for conversion
 |
| Lent. |
In his message for Lent, Pope Francis warns that once God’s
law is forsaken, the law of the strong over the weak takes over.
By Linda Bordoni
Pope Francis is calling on the faithful not to
let the Lenten season of grace pass in vain, and to live as children of God
acknowledging and obeying His law, in particular in regards to our brothers and
sisters and to creation.
In this year’s Lenten message, the Pope invites
believers to prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart
renewed, warning that “Sin leads man to consider himself the god of creation,
to see himself as its absolute master and to use it, not for the purpose willed
by the Creator but for his own interests”.
The Pope’s Lenten message was released on Tuesday during a
press conference at the Holy See Press Office. The theme chosen this year
is “For the creation waits with eager longing for
the revealing of the children of God” (Rom 8:19)
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, 6 March, and will
conclude on Holy Saturday, 20 April, the day before
Easter.
“Let us leave behind our selfishness and self-absorption,
and turn to Jesus’ Pasch. Let us stand beside our brothers and sisters in need,
sharing our spiritual and material goods with them”.
This is one of the key passages of Pope Francis’ Lenten
Message for 2019. Reflecting on a verse from St. Paul’s Letter to the
Romans, the Pope highlights how the season before Easter must be a time to
“welcome Christ’s victory over sin and death into our lives”, and attract “its
transforming power to all of creation”
Fasting, prayer, almsgiving
Appealing to the faithful to not allow this season of grace
to pass in vain, Pope Francis says that if, “the Lent of the Son of God
‘was an entry into the desert of creation to make it become again that garden
of communion with God” that it was before the original sin, Christians today
are invited “to embody the paschal mystery more deeply and concretely in their
personal, family and social lives, above all by fasting, prayer and
almsgiving.”
Fasting, the Pope says, means turning away from the
temptation to “devour” everything to satisfy our voracity; Prayer teaches
us to abandon idolatry and the self-sufficiency of our ego; Almsgiving,
whereby we escape from the insanity of hoarding everything for ourselves in the
illusory belief that we can secure a future that does not belong to us.
If we follow this journey, he said it “is possible to
rediscover the joy of God’s plan for creation and for each of us, which is to
love him, our brothers and sisters, and the entire world, and to find in this
love our true happiness”.
Conversion
The path to Easter, therefore, demands that “we renew our
faces and hearts as Christians through repentance, conversion and forgiveness”
the Pope said pointing out that it is a call that involves the whole of
creation.
This “eager longing”, this expectation of all creation, Pope
Francis says, will be fulfilled in the revelation of the children of God, that
is, when Christians and all people enter decisively into the “travail” that
conversion entails.
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