Pope on the Sunday of the Word invokes ‘the Lord for peace’
Francis kicked off the Year of Prayer, ahead of the 2025 Jubilee, asking us to pray “to prepare us to live well this event of grace.” He urged the faithful to pray "for Christian unity" and peace. He also turned his thoughts to the “many injured and killed children”. More than 10,000 have died in Gaza since the start of the conflict. We must “build peace for them!”
Vatican City (AsiaNews) – Today is the Fifth Sunday of the Word of God. Established in 2019, this year’s theme is "Remain in my Word" (Jn 8:31).
At the Angelus, Pope Francis kicked off the Year of Prayer, which consists of twelve months dedicated to rediscovering prayer’s “great value and absolute need," especially in preparation for the 2025 Jubilee and the opening of the Holy Door, “in personal life, in the life of the Church, and in the world”.
Looking ahead to the jubilee year, whose motto is "Pilgrims of Hope", set to begin at the end of 2024, the pontiff addressed an invitation to those listening, both in St Peter's Square, crowded despite a recent cold snap in Rome, and remotely.
“I ask you to intensify your prayer to prepare us to live well this event of grace, and to experience the strength of God’s hope,” Francis said.
The “Dicastery for Evangelization will make available” resources to the faithful in the coming months, he explained, but the priority now is to pray "for Christian unity," and peace in a war-torn world.
“[L]et us never tire of invoking the Lord for peace in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and in many other parts of the world,” he went on to say.
Pope Francis turned his thoughts also to the "weakest", the first to suffer from war, “the little ones,” that is “the many injured and killed children,” and the people “deprived of affection, deprived of dreams and of a future”.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 10,000 children have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, against a total death toll of at least 25,000 people. More than 60,000 people have been wounded. “Let us feel the responsibility to pray and build peace for them!” Francis said.
At the end of the commentary that followed the Marian prayer, the pope mentioned last Friday's kidnapping "of a group of people" in Haiti, including six nuns of the Congregation of St Anne, seized while travelling by bus to Port-au-Prince.
“I have learned with sorrow of the kidnapping,” he said; “in my heartfelt plea for their release, I pray for social concord in the country, and I invite everyone to bring an end to the violence, which is causing a great deal of suffering to that dear population.”
At 9:30 am this morning, the Holy Father led the Mass in St Peter's Basilica for the Sunday of the Word of God. On this occasion he conferred the ministries of Lector and Catechist upon 11 lay men and women who came from different parts of the world.
In his homily, Pope Francis spoke of the "dynamic” Word of God, starting with today's Gospel (Mk 1:14-20), centred on "the vocation of the first disciples” called by Jesus with the following words: “Come, follow me” to “become fishers of men.”
This is based on the assumption that the Word “does not leave us self-absorbed, but expands hearts, changes courses, overturns habits”. It “discloses unthought-of horizons”, which “is what the word of God wants to do in each of us”.
Examples of "witnesses to the Gospel" are plentiful and for them, at some point, "the Word was decisive”, people like Saint Anthony, Saint Augustine, Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, and Francis of Assisi.
Yet, “how is it that, for many of us, the same thing does not happen?”’ Francis asked. Instead, “overwhelmed by a barrage of words, we let the word of God glide by us.”
Reflecting upon two actions proposed in today's Gospel, leaving and following, the pope noted that, at Jesus’s urging, Simon and his brother Andrew "left their nets and followed him."
Leaving means detaching oneself from “our security” and “our routine”, while following means "to mature in truth and charity".
In the commentary before the Angelus, Pope Francis looked out from the Apostolic Palace and returned to the passage from the Evangelist Mark, explaining that the action Jesus undertook is one of the first things he did “at the beginning of His public life.”
This means, the pontiff stressed that “the Lord loves to involve us in His work of salvation, He wants us to be active with Him”. He does so with a lot of "patience" because often the disciples struggled to grasp his teachings.
In concluding, Pope Francis said that “To proclaim the Gospel, then, is not wasted time: it is being happier by helping others to be happy”; for when someone joins Jesus “in the beautiful adventure of giving love, light and joy multiply”.
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