Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Feb 5, 2019 / 02:32 am (CNA).- Preaching on the Beatitudes during his visit to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, Pope Francis called on those present to seek communion with Christ before all else.
“Let us together ask here today for the grace of rediscovering the attraction of following Jesus, of imitating him, of not seeking anyone else but him and his humble love,” the pope said Feb. 5 during Mass at Zayed Sports City, a stadium in Abu Dhabi.
“For here is the meaning of our life: in communion with him and in our love for others,” he added.
Pope Francis is in the Emirati capital Feb. 3-5 to promote interreligious dialogue and to give support to the country’s Christian minority. During his visit he also attended an interreligious meeting and met privately with the Muslim Council of Elders.
Christ pronounced the Beatitudes to “fix in our hearts,” the pope said, the “essential message” that “if you are with Jesus, if you love to listen to his word as the disciples of that time did, if you try to live out this word every day, then you are blessed.”
“The Christian life, first and foremost, is not … simply a list of external prescriptions to fulfil or a set of teachings to know,” but “rather, it is the knowledge that, in Jesus, we are the Father’s beloved children.”
“The Christian life means living out the joy of this blessedness, wanting to live life as a love story, the story of God’s faithful love, he who never abandons us and wishes to be in communion with us always,” Francis stated. “This is the reason for our joy, a joy that no one in the world and no circumstance in our lives can take from us. It is a joy that gives peace also in the midst of pain, a joy that already makes us participate in that eternal happiness which awaits us.”
The Beatitudes are “an overturning of that popular thinking, according to which it is the rich and the powerful who are blessed, those who are successful and acclaimed by the crowds,” he said.
“Let us look at how Jesus lived: poor in respect to things, but wealthy in love; he healed so many lives, but did not spare his own. He came to serve and not to be served; he taught us that greatness is not found in having but rather in giving. Just and meek, he did not offer resistance, but allowed himself to be condemned unjustly. In this way Jesus brought God’s love into the world. Only in this way did he defeat death, sin, fear and even worldliness: only by the power of divine love.”
Pope Francis thanked the Catholics living in the UAE for “the way in which you live the Gospel we heard.”
He added that following Christ doesn’t mean “always being cheerful,” saying that one “who is afflicted, who suffers injustice, who does everything he can to be a peacemaker, knows what it means to suffer.”
Many of the Catholics in Abu Dhabi are guest workers from Africa, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, though some are local Arabs.
The pope noted that many of the UAE’s Catholics “live far from home, missing the affection of your loved ones, and perhaps also feeling uncertainty about the future.”
“The Lord is faithful and does not abandon his people,” Pope Francis said. He recalled the life of St. Anthony the Great, who was accompanied by Christ amid his torments, saying: “The Lord is close. It can happen that, when faced with fresh sorrow or a difficult period, we think we are alone, even after all the time we have spent with the Lord. But in those moments, where he might not intervene immediately, he walks at our side. And if we continue to go forward, he will open up a new way for us; for the Lord specializes in doing new things; he can even open paths in the desert.”
Living the Beatitudes does not require “great works”, Pope Francis said, but “the imitation of Jesus in our everyday life.”
The Beatitudes “invite us to keep our hearts pure, to practice meekness and justice despite everything, to be merciful to all, to live affliction in union with God,” and they are “for those who face up to the challenges and trials of each day.”
“Those who live out the Beatitudes according to Jesus are able to cleanse the world. They are like a tree that even in the wasteland absorbs polluted air each day and gives back oxygen. It is my hope that you will be like this, rooted in Jesus and ready to do good to those around you. May your communities be oases of peace.”
The pope singled out two of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the meek, and Blessed are the peacemakers.
Concerning meekness, he said: “Those who attack or overpower others are not blessed, but rather those that uphold Jesus’ way of acting, he who saved us, and who was meek even towards his accusers.”
The pope quoted from St. Francis of Assisi’s Earlier Rule regarding approaches to “Saracens and non-Christians”: “Let them not get into arguments or disagreements, but be subject to every human creature out of love for God, and let them profess that they are Christians”.
“Neither arguments nor disagreements,” the pope stressed. “At that time, as many people were setting out, heavily armed, Saint Francis pointed out that Christians set out armed only with their humble faith and concrete love. Meekness is important.”
Turning to “Blessed are the peacemakers”, Pope Francis said that a Christian “promotes peace, starting with the community where he or she lives.”
“I ask for you the grace to preserve peace, unity, to take care of each other, with that beautiful fraternity in which there are no first or second class Christians,” he told the Catholics living in the UAE.
Pope Francis concluded: “May Jesus, who calls you blessed, give you the grace to go forward without becoming discouraged, abounding in love ‘to one another and to all’.”
At the conclusion of Mass, Pope Francis was addressed by Bishop Paul Hinder, Vicar Apostolic of Southern Arabia, who thanked him for his visit.
Bishop Hinder said that the pope had “come to a Muslim country with the intention to do as Saint Francis did in the year 1219,” when he met in “mutual respect” with Al-Kamil, Sultan of Egypt.
“We Christians try to implement the order Saint Francis gave at his time to his brothers and to ‘live spiritually among the Muslims … not to engage in arguments and (simply) to acknowledge that (we) are Christians.’”
The bishop also thanked the Emirati authorities, especially Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “who generously have made possible this visit and given us this space in order to have a public Mass with as many faithful as possible.”
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I hope the people of Israel come out of this safely. I had the opportunity to go there on a pilgrimage with my church in 2019. It was an immense privilege to walk in so many biblical towns and have daily Mass in all the churches. A beautiful and interesting place. The site of the crucifixion and the tomb was amazing to see and touch. Very spiritually moving. We were there during the Trump administration, and the American embassy had just been moved to Jerusalem. I was so sad to hear news of this attack this morning. Many of those living there are transplanted Americans. Please pray for them.
Israel will prevail, but at a cost. Things will get ugly. The Palestinians blame Israel for their misery and stupidity. Man for man, the Israelis put them to shame.
Palestinians are intelligent people but have been manipulated and misled by Hamas. It’s a tragedy.
Biden built this; he, Valerie Jarret and Obama. The finger prints are obvious. I wouldn’t be surprised at all that many of the munitions Hamas used were sold off from the Ukraine and have our insignias. There is no oversight and Ukraine’s government is the epitome of moral bankruptcy. This news just makes the Lacrimarum Vale that much deeper, darker and loathsome.
From Islamist anti-Semitism is behind Israel’s darkest hour since the Yom Kippur war, by Jake Wallis Simons, October 7, 2023:
Excerpt (with link omitted, bold style added):
In response, sensible voices must be absolutely clear: this was an anti-Semitic attack. It was of a piece with the pogroms carried out by the Cossacks, the Iraqi mobs during the Farhud, and the Nazis.
That last example is especially powerful, as a direct line can be drawn from Hitler to Hamas. During the Second World War, the extremist Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, who compared Jewishness to infectious disease and Jews to microbes or bacilli, worked with Nazi officials to translate Third Reich ideology into an Arabic context and transmit it into the Middle East via radio, leaflets and other means. His twisted ideology rings loudly in our ears today.
Look at Hamas’s charter. Article 32 – a conspiracy theory which accuses the Zionists of wishing to take over the entire territory between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq, an area of thousands of square miles – says: “Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To describe Hamas as being influenced by Nazi propaganda is insufficient. This is Nazi propaganda.
I don’t believe that this was a surprise attack. It is likely a “playing the victim” strategy.
Interesting comment, considering the Jerusalem Post is suggesting the attack is a contender for the greatest intelligence failure in Israeli history. “How did Israel fall so far to such an inferior enemy?” the tagline asks. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-765254
Perhaps you will claim that the JPost story is also part of the same strategy? A rabbi in Jerusalem claims that the earthquake in Morocco was caused by their king’s call for Jerusalem to become the Palestinian capital. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-761707
Seems like there’s no shortage of dotted-line thinking on both sides.
Which side do you think is playing victim?
After the British occupiers left Palestine, the United Nations 1947 Resolution no. 181 mandated the creation of two nations, Israel and Palestine, each with almost equal land areas. After wars and perpetual tensions through the decades the land area has been disproportionately made unequal by continued Israeli grabbing of Palestinian lands in defiance of UN and international laws leaving the Palestinians with only small portions that is the West Bank and Gaza even as the state of Palestine remains not fully established and sovereign today. While the Western media portray the Palestinians as the bad guys and terrorists, it is actually the Israelis who are so by their continued dispossession and dislocation of the Palestinians in violation of UN and international laws. Even present day pilgrims to the Holy Land can readily see the continued construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank contravening UN and international laws. Seen from this perspective, the modern state of Israel can be compared to China defying UN and international laws like the International Court of Arbitration that judged China’s grabbing of Philippine maritime territory as illegal. Palestinian militants rising against Israel mighty army can be compared to the Filipinos’ decrepit coast guard standing up against China’s bully coast guard as seen more and more on TV news recently.
There are many, many questions that need to be answered about the attack on Israel yesterday. How could a country with intelligence agencies renowned for their ability to infiltrate its enemies and allies alike be caught so flat-footed? This was a major operation and the Mossad apparently had no inkling that it was coming. That is very hard to believe. The surveillance and detection systems at the border were reportedly jammed by Hamas. If that is true, why did this in and of itself not cause an alarm to go off? Where was the world-class Israeli Air Force, which must patrol the relatively short border around the clock? Paragliders sailed right across the border after dawn had already broken without a sign of an Israeli aircraft, which could have easily picked them off. Even more incredibly, there is video of Hamas troops casually cutting through the border fence later in broad daylight with no cover and then streaming through with their pickup trucks and motorcycles in the open desert. Again, an airstrike by jets that could have arrived in a couple of minutes would have wipe these people out in an instant. This is either an epic and astonishing failure of Israel’s entire security apparatus or there is more to this story than what we see on the surface. I don’t pretend to know what happened and am afraid that no one is going to be seriously interested in finding out.
If Israel’s intelligence was taken off guard it should give us pause to wonder where our own defense system may have gaps. There’s no perfect intelligence department. We become complacent at our own peril.
The Gaza strip, and all Palestinian territory, is heavily infiltrated by Mossad, Shin Bet, and IDF personnel. *No way were they surprised.*
Israel either made or allowed this to occur–so that they could draw sympathy upon themselves, divert attention from the impending victory of gentile Christian Putin over Jewish Zelensky (bad PR for the Tribe!), and use this event as a pretext to wipe out the Palestinians.
The evidence presented thus far of an attack (fan para-gliders? really? unblocked and unnoticed truck and AFV attacks? really?) with attendant massive Israeli deaths looks suspicious and stagey–though there are probably some real Israel deaths as well. The bigwigs in Tel Aviv–and now Jerusalem–don’t mind killing (or allowing to be killed) a few of the lesser Israelis in order to advance Israeli goals of total dominion over the mid-east.
The effect of this will be to get the US to pony up even more billions for Israel (while Americans in Maui get 700 dollars for their torched homes) and allow Netanyahu to do what he has always wanted to do–genocide the Palestinians.
Also, the linking of the Palestinians to Iran will (of course) be made, and the US will now be easily induced to attack that country, especially as Biden needs a victory–since his proxy war against Russia is faring so badly.
Many Americans, including Christians are waking up however. They no longer believe the traditional 70s and 80s propaganda about dem Evil Iranians and dem Evil Ay-Rabs and dose good Israelis.
The US is a fast-fading empire. It literally does *nothing* right (see Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine). It is ruled by wicked and foolish men (and now women). But it does have, unlike Iraq, many weapons of mass destruction, and a mad beast is always dangerous.
Anyway, break out the popcorn and enjoy the Apocalyptic show! (I’m kidding, pray and make sacrifices for peace!).