At the Angelus, Francis signed up, along with two young Portuguese, for the World Youth Day in Lisbon, which will take place in August 2023. The “anxiety” over the conflict in Ethiopia and the “sadness” over the floods in Africa. The interreligious meeting for peace, to be held at the Coliseum on October 25. The Pharisee and the publican of the Gospel parable, with the movements of “up and down”.
Vatican City () – The World Mission Day, which is celebrated today under the motto “So that you may be my witnesses” is an “important occasion” to “awaken” in all the baptized the desire to participate “in the universal mission of the Church through witness and proclamation of the Gospel” . Pope Francis underlined this today at the Angelus, encouraging the faithful to “support the missionaries with prayer and concrete solidarity” so that they can “continue the work of evangelization and human promotion throughout the world”.
The Pontiff then invited two young Portuguese people to lean out with him at the window of the Apostolic Palace to commemorate World Youth Day in August 2023 in Lisbon, registration for which opens today. Francisco took advantage of the occasion to register himself virtually, also inviting the young people who were next to him to do so through the web page dedicated to it (in the photo). “I’m also signing up as a pilgrim,” she said, “and I’ll get these two young men signed up, too.” The Pope then addressed the boys and girls from all over the world, urging them to register. “After the distance” imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, he called for rediscovering “the fraternal embrace that we so much need.”
In his long speech at the end of the Marian prayer, the Pope praised the testimony of the new blessed, the Spanish Redemptorist martyrs. They are Fr. Vicente Nicasio Renuncio Toribio and eleven companions, assassinated in 1936 during the persecution against Christians in the civil war. “Your witness to Christ -he said- encourages us to be consistent and courageous” in the proclamation of the Gospel. Finally, the Pontiff commented that he was following the conflict in Ethiopia “with concern”, and said that the violence does not serve to resolve the “discord” but rather increases its “tragic consequences”. In this sense, he called for “equitable solutions for a lasting peace.” He then expressed his sadness over the floods in Africa, prayed for the new government that takes office today in Italy and concluded by recalling that on October 25, at the Colosseum in Rome, the interreligious prayer for peace will take place. He invited to “pray for the tormented Ukraine”.
Previously, during the introduction to the Angelus, the Pontiff delved into the passage from the Gospel of Luke in which the parable of the Pharisee and the publican is presented, with the “up and down” movements on which the reflection focuses. The protagonists are two very different men, namely “a religious man and a declared sinner”, but only the latter “truly rises to God” because he presents himself before Him with humility and in the full truth of himself and his boundaries.
The verb to go up, object of the first part of the reflection, appears in many passages of the Old Testament, from Abraham to Moses and Jesus in the New Testament in the experience of the transfiguration. “Going up,” the Pope observes, “expresses the need of the heart to detach from a flat life to go to meet the Lord; rise from the plains of our ego to ascend towards God; free ourselves from our ego, collect what we live in the valley to take it before the Lord; this is going up and when we pray, we go up”.
Then there is the second movement, that of “going down” within ourselves to experience the encounter with God, honestly looking at our “fragility and poverty.” “In humility – he stresses – we become capable of taking God, without pretending anything, with what we are, with the limitations and wounds, the sins and the miseries that weigh on our hearts, and to invoke his mercy so that we Heal us, heal us and lift us up. It is He who will lift us up, not us. The more we humbly go down, the more God will lift us up.” Starting from these two verbs, the Pontiff analyzes the two opposite attitudes of the Pharisee and the publican: the former is “convinced that he is well” and begins to praise himself as the priest who “turns the incense towards himself” [el papa se refiere a un sacerdote de Argentina, una anécdota que contó] . The second, on the other hand, “asks for forgiveness”.
They are two attitudes that “touch us closely” and thinking about them “let’s look at ourselves,” the Pontiff asked; “let’s check if in us, as in the Pharisee, there is ‘the intimate presumption of being just’ that leads us to despise others […] Brothers, let us be attentive to narcissism and exhibitionism, founded on vainglory, which also leads us Christians, us priests, us bishops to always have a word on our lips. What word? ‘I'”. “Where there is too much ‘I'”, the Pope concludes, “there is little God” and that is why we must look even more to the Virgin who is “the living image” of what God “loves to do: to overthrow the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.”
