Francesco draws attention again to the ongoing conflict and recalls his visit to the children injured fleeing the bombs.
The tragic facts mentioned in today’s Gospel raise “everywhere” questions, especially about the way God intervenes in our daily lives.
Are pandemics and wars a punishment from God?
“When Crime reports depress us and we feel powerless against evil, one often asks oneself: Is it perhaps a punishment from God?“. Pope Francis asked this question during the Angelus.
Today’s Gospel passage tells of “eighteen men who died when a tower fell down” and “some of the Galileans whom Pilate killed (cf. Lk 13:1)”.
Then more questions arise: Is it God “who sends a war or a pandemic to punish us for our sins? AND Why doesn’t the Lord intervene?“.
The Holy Father told us to be careful: “When evil oppresses us, we risk losing clarity, and in order to find a simple answer to what we cannot explain, we end up blaming God“.
Like the fruitless fig
People often blame God for the “misfortunes and misfortunes of the world” when in reality he “never intervenes, imposing himself, but only suggesting himself.” God himself “never uses violence and actually suffers for us and with us.
Jesus denies this way of thinking, which is so widespread today, and explains it the victims of the collapsed tower are neither “more guilty than others” nor “victims of a merciless and vengeful god who does not exist!”.
From God “evil can never come, because he does not “treat us according to our sins” (Ps 103:10), but according to his mercy”. It is not God, but “sin that produces death; it is our selfishness that tears relationships apart; It is our wrong and violent choices that unleash evil‘ the Pope explained.
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However, Jesus invites us to convert from evil, “to renounce the sin that deceives us”, to open ourselves to the “logic of the Gospel”, because “where love and brotherhood reign, evil no longer has power”.
Knowing that “we often fall back into the same errors and the same sins” and become discouraged, Jesus tells a parable of “God’s patience with us.” The fig that “does not bear fruit in the appointed time” is not cut, but “is given more time, one more chance”.
Similar is the attitude of the Lord, who “does not cut us off from his love, does not lose heart, never tires of restoring our trust with tenderness. God “does not see the results you have not yet achieved, but the fruits you can yet bear; does not take into account your shortcomings, but promotes your possibilities; it doesn’t dwell on your past but confidently bets on your future.
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Ukraine: a “sacrilegious” war
At the end of the Angelus, a new call for peace in Ukraine, where amid “devastation and atrocities” a “senseless massacre” continues. “There is no justification for this,” Francis said, imploring “all actors in the international community to really work to end this heinous war.”
Bergoglio recalled his touching visit to the children wounded in the war who were now hospitalized in Rome. “One is missing an arm,” another is “injured in the head,” he emphasized. “Many children and fragile people he added they die under the bombs without receiving any help and without even finding safety in the airraid shelters“.
All these horrors, the Holy Father continued, are an “inhuman and sacrilegious cruelty”, above all because “it violates the sanctity of human life”, in particular “defenseless human life that needs to be respected and protected“.
“I am comforted to know that the population exposed to the bombs is not lacking Closeness to the pastors who, in these tragic days, live the Gospel of charity and brotherhood‘ said the Pope, thanking them for their witness and referring in particular to the new apostolic nuncio to Ukraine, Visvaldas Kulbokas, ‘who has remained in Kyiv since the beginning of the war’.
In conclusion, the pope exhorted to welcome refugees “with generosity not only now in times of need, but also in the coming months and weeks. protect them from the “vultures of society” who can exploit them.
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