Be witnesses of hope in the face of evil, Francis urges Catholics in Nagasaki

Vatican City, Jun 6, 2017 / 02:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis said Tuesday that truthfulness is the weapon against the temptation of hypocrisy, which destroys the community with lies and flattery.

“The hypocrite is capable of destroying a community. While speaking gently, he ruinously judges a person. He is a killer,” said the Pope during his homily at Mass June 6 at the chapel of the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.

Pope Francis reflected on the Gospel passage in which the Pharisees and Herodians, who tried to ensnare Christ with his words, began by flattery.

“The hypocrite always uses language to flatter,” said the Pope, explaining that they will exaggerate the truth, “feeding into one’s vanity.”

He continued to the say that hypocrites are two-faced, and “the language of hypocrisy is the language of deceit, it is the same language the serpent used with Eve.”

He gave an example of a priest he met who “drank up all the flattery,” and he said that flattery is initiated by bad intentions. He said the Pharisees were trying to hide their true intentions, hoping to test Christ by asking him, “is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?”

However, he said reality and truth are the tools to combat such hypocrisy, and it is Christ who exposes a lie with reality.

“Jesus always responds to hypocrites and ideologists with reality: ‘this is the reality; everything else is either hypocrisy or ideology.’”

He continued to say that “the reality was that the coin carried the image of Caesar.”

Hypocrisy not only destroys community, but he said it also “tears to pieces the personality and the soul of a person.”

Pope Francis ended his homily asking the Lord to strengthen a commitment to truth by the members of the Church.

“Let us ask the Lord to guard us from this vice, to help us be truthful, and if this is not possible to keep silent – but never to be a hypocrite.”

[…]

Pope Francis’ Angelus message on Jan. 1, 2023, marked the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. An estimated 40,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the event. / Vatican Media

Rome Newsroom, Jan 1, 2023 / 08:31 am (CNA).

Let Mary, the Mother of God, be your guide in the New Year, Pope Francis said on Sunday, the first day of 2023.

In his Angelus address before a crowd of an estimated 40,000 people in St. Peter’s Square Jan. 1, the pope said: “As we contemplate Mary in the stable where Jesus was born, let us ask ourselves: What languages does the Holy Virgin use to speak to us? How does Mary speak?”

“What can we learn from her for this year that is dawning?” he added. “We can say: Virgin Mary, teach us what we should do this year.”

The pope’s message preceding the Angelus prayer was delivered on the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Pope Francis also celebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica earlier in the day to mark the feast day.

At the beginning of his Angelus message, Pope Francis remembered his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who died on Dec. 31 at the age of 95.

Echoing his words at Mass Sunday, he invited Catholics to invoke the Virgin Mary’s intercession for Benedict. “Let us all join together, with one heart and one soul, in thanking God for the gift of this faithful servant of the Gospel and of the Church,” he said.

‘The language of love’

His Angelus reflection focused on the “language of Mary,” specifically her tenderness and care for the Baby Jesus.

The Gospel of Luke describes the shepherds’ encounter with the Holy Family, and how they saw the infant Jesus “lying in the manger.”

“This verb ‘to lay’ means to carefully place, and tells us that the language proper to Mary is maternal: She tenderly takes care — this is the language of Mary — to tenderly take care of the Child. This is Mary’s greatness,” he said.

He described a noisy scene: the angels celebrating Christ’s birth and the shepherds running to meet Jesus with everyone loudly praising God.

Instead, “Mary does not speak,” Francis said, “she does not steal the show — we like to steal the show! On the contrary, she puts the Child in the center, she lovingly takes care of him.”

The pope recalled a line of poetry from the Italian writer Alda Merini, which says that Mary “even knew how to be solemnly mute, […] because she did not want to lose sight of her God.” 

All mothers do the same, he said: “After having carried the gift of a mysterious prodigy in her womb for nine months, mothers constantly put their babies at the center of their attention: They feed them, they hold them in their arms, they tenderly lay them down in the crib.”

The Mother of God’s language is “a language of a mother,” he added.

Mary, Pope Francis said, “reminds us that, if we truly want the New Year to be good, if we want to reconstruct hope, we need to abandon the language, those actions and those choices inspired by egoism, and learn the language of love, which is to take care.”

He continued: “This is the commitment: to take care of our lives, of our time, of our souls; to take care of creation and the environment we live in; and even more, to take care of our neighbor, of those whom the Lord has placed alongside us, as well as our brothers and sisters who are in need and who call for our attention and our compassion.”

[…]

Vatican City, May 10, 2017 / 05:56 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Days before his trip to Fatima, Pope Francis said Mary’s ‘yes’ at the Annunciation was more than a yes to bearing the Son of God, but was also an acceptance of everything she would endure after – something every mother experiences with a new child.  

“It was not easy to answer with a ‘yes’ to the angel’s invitation; yet she, a woman still in the flower of youth, answers with courage, despite not knowing anything about the fate that awaited her.”

“Mary at that moment looks like one of the many mothers of our world, brave to the extreme when it comes to welcoming in her womb the story of a new human being who is growing,” he said May 10.

Her ‘yes’ to the angel at the Annunciation was just the first step “in a long list of obedience” leading to the moment she stands at the foot of her Son’s cross, the Pope said.

During his general audience, Pope Francis centered his catechesis on the few lines from the Gospel of John that describe Mary “standing by the cross of Jesus.” Though Mary is largely a silent figure in the Gospels, she listens and “ponders every word and every event in her heart.”

“The Gospels are laconic, and extremely subtle. They record with a simple verb the presence of the Mother: She ‘was standing,’ she was standing,” he said, noting that “nothing is said of her reaction: if she weeps, if she does not weep … nothing; not even a brushstroke to describe her grief.”

Throughout history poets and painters have imagined this moment in art and literature, “but the Gospels just say, she was ‘standing.’ She was there, in the worst moment, in the cruelest time, and suffered with her son,” but “she was standing,” Francis said.

Though there had been a “slow eclipse” of her presence in the Gospels, she returns at this crucial moment when many others had fled.

“Mothers do not betray, and at that moment, at the foot of the cross, none of us can say whose was the cruelest passion; whether that of an innocent man who dies on the scaffold of the cross, or the agony of a mother who accompanies the last moments of her son’s life,” he said.

And she doesn’t get angry or protest: she simply stands and listens, Pope Francis said, pointing to the relationship between listening and the virtue of hope.

Despite everything, even the “deepest darkness,” Mary does not leave, but stands faithfully, he said. “That’s why we all love her as a Mother…We are not orphans: we have a Mother in heaven, who is the Holy Mother of God.”

Mary, he said, teaches to us “the virtue of waiting, even when everything seems meaningless: she is always confident in the mystery of God.”

Even though she didn’t know what the outcome of her Son’s Passion would be, she is loyal to the plan of God, just as she promised to the angel “on the first day of her vocation,” Francis said, explaining that it is also part of her motherly instinct to suffer for her child.

“The suffering of mothers: We have all known strong women that braved the many sufferings of their children!” he said.

Even in the first days of the Church, before Christ’s resurrection is known and the disciples are all afraid, the “Mother of Hope” stays, Francis said. “She was simply there, in the most normal of ways, as if it were a natural thing.”

Thus, he concluded, “in moments of difficulty, Mary, the Mother Jesus has given to us all, can always support our steps, can always say to our heart: ‘Get up! Look ahead, look at the horizon,’ because she is a Mother of Hope.”

[…]