Child soldiers, men and women tortured and persecuted. Poor, hungry, orphaned. Wars and bombs dropped like candy. What a bad scenario the world of today presents. “I don’t think our times are better than those of the flood; I don’t think so. Calamities are more or less the same; the victims are more or less the same”, Francis says in todays’ Santa Marta mass.
The Pope continues to stir the hearts of believers and in his homily - reported by Vatican News – exhorting “to ask for the grace to cry when faced with the world’s calamities and the victims of war, the persecuted”. Indifference is by all means a serious dangers in the face of the tragedies that are experienced in some parts of the world. Before them “God suffers” the Pontiff affirms. This is a God with feelings – he continues - “who is not abstract” and “who suffers, who is capable of getting angry, of grieving but above all of being a brother among his brothers and sisters, a father with his children”.
“Our God has feelings – Francis points out - Our God loves us with the heart; He doesn’t love us with ideas but loves us with the heart. And when He caresses us, He caresses us with His heart, and when He disciplines us, like a good father, He disciplines us with His heart, suffering more than we do”. And “if he is able to grieve in his heart, we too - he adds - will be able to grieve”.
“There is the great calamity of the flood; there is the great calamity of today’s wars, where the price is paid by the weak, the poor, children, and those who have no resources to carry on,” the Bishop of Rome points out. There are problems and calamities, poor, hungry, persecuted, and tortured people, “people who die in war because others throw bombs as if they were candy”.
“I don’t think our times are better than those of the flood; I don’t think so. Calamities are more or less the same; the victims are more or less the same. Let’s think about the example of the weakest: children. The many hungry children and children without education cannot grow in peace. [Many are] without parents because they have been massacred in war… child soldiers… Let us just think about those children.”
And, with this in mind, we shall ask for the grace to have “a heart like the heart of God – one made in the likeness of God” that feels pain when witnessing others suffer. Certain that the Lord is pained in His heart, let us draw near to the Lord and speak to Him, saying: ‘Lord, observe these things; I understand you.’ Let us console the Lord: ‘I understand you, and I am with you. I accompany you in prayer and intercede for all of these calamities which are the fruit of the devil who wants to destroy the work of God”.
