"The Pope challenged the young pilgrims from all over the world.“‹"
"The Pope challenged the young pilgrims from all over the world.“‹"
This has been a good week for Catholics, especially the youth, with Pope Francis visiting Panama to attend World Youth Day. Once again, tens of thousands of young people flocked to this gathering of hope with a majority coming from the countries of Central America.
The main theme of the Pope’s homilies in Panama was hope. In his mass with priests and religious, acknowledging the crisis faced by the Church because of the sexual abuse scandals, he talked about how to overcome weariness. In the vigil mass with the pilgrims, Pope Francis exhorted the role of Mary as the great influencer. And on his final mass in Panama, the Vicar of Christ proclaimed the importance of love to find meaning in our live and to change our society better.
The Pope’s homily in his Mass for clergy was based on the Gospel reading that describes Jesus wearily sitting beside the well and asking the Samaritan woman to give Him a drink of water. Pope Francis reflected on the theme of weariness in the lives of priests, consecrated men and women, and members of lay movements. According to him, “The causes of this weariness, he said, range from long hours of work, to relationships that lead to exhaustion and disappointment,” “from simple daily commitments, to burdensome routines,” “from predictable little problems, to stressful periods of pressure.’’ What is needed, according to Francis, is “a well from which we can set out once more.”
Pope Francis called this “the weariness of hope,” one that paralyzes us because it “calls into question the energy, resources and viability of our mission in this changing and challenging world.” “What was meaningful and important in the past can now no longer seem valid,” he added. This weariness of hope is a result of seeing a Church wounded by sin that opens the door to the “heresy” of believing that the Lord and our communities have nothing to say to the new world now being born.
The response, like Jesus in the well with that Samaritan woman, was to be courageous and ask to quench our thirst, trusting that, as God did yesterday, “He will still do tomorrow.”
In the Vigil Mass, Pope Francis gave Mary a new title the “the ‘influencer’ of God,” being the ultimate example of how to say ‘yes’ and to “trust in the love and promises of God.” According to Francis: “Mary’s ‘yes’ echoes and expands in every generation . . . To be an “influencer” in the 21st Century is to be guardians of roots of everything that makes us feel part of one another” that makes us “feel we belong.”
The Pope challenged the young pilgrims from all over the world: “Are you willing to say ‘yes’? Are you willing to be an ‘influencer’ like Mary?”
Finally, in the last Mass, before going back to Rome, Pope Francis proposed to young people how they could find happiness and meaning in the world:
“You, dear young people, are not the future but the now of God. He invites you and calls you in your communities and cities to go out and find your grandparents, your elders; to stand up and with them to speak out and realize the dream that the Lord has dreamed for you.
Not tomorrow but now, for wherever your treasure is, there will your heart also be. Whatever you fall in love with, it will win over not only your imagination, it will affect everything. It will be what makes you get up in the morning, what keeps you going at times of fatigue, what will break open your hearts and fill you with wonder, joy and gratitude. Realize that you have a mission and fall in love; that will decide everything. We may possess everything, but if we lack the passion of love, we will have nothing. Let us allow the Lord to make us fall in love!
For Jesus, there is no “meantime,” but only a merciful love that wants to enter into and win over our hearts. He wants to be our treasure, because he is not a “meantime,” an interval in life or a passing fad; he is generous love that invites us to entrust ourselves.
He is concrete, close, real love. He is festive joy, born of opting for and taking part in the miraculous draught of hope and charity, solidarity and fraternity, despite the paralyzed and paralyzing gaze born of fear and exclusion, speculation and manipulation.
Before leaving Panama, Pope Francis condoled with us in the Philippines, reeling from the bombings in the Cathedral of Jolo which killed 20 or more people. He entrusted the victims of the attack to Christ and to the Virgin and prayed for the Lord to “convert the hearts of the violent and grant the inhabitants of that region a peaceful coexistence.”
Facebook Page: Professor Tony La Viña Twitter: tonylavs
