The death of Pope Francis, leaves the Vatican in what is called, ‘Sede Vacante’. This means the Vatican focuses only on day-to-day activities. For example, the canonisation of Blessed Carlo Acutis has been postponed. May Pope Francis rest in peace.
During his pontificate, Pope Francis wrote four encyclicals. Here we share passages from his first two encyclicals. Next week we look at the third and fourth. They give us a sense of what he shared with us in words.
Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith): in n.17 he writes: Precisely because Jesus is the Son, because he is absolutely grounded in the Father, he was able to conquer death and make the fullness of life shine forth. Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
Laudato Si (On Care for our Common Home): in n.217 he writes: The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast” (quote from, Benedict XVI, Homily for the Solemn Inauguration of the Petrine Ministry, 24th April 2005). For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion. It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So, what they all need is an “ecological conversion”, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.