IMAGE: CNS/Paul Haring
By Cindy Wooden
ROME (CNS) — A practical first step toward holiness — as
well as for assuring peace in one’s family and in the world — is to pray
for a person who has caused offense or harm, Pope Francis said.
“Are you merciful toward the people who have harmed you
or don’t like you? If God is merciful, if he is holy, if he is perfect, then we
must be merciful, holy and perfect as he is. This is holiness. A man or woman
who does this deserves to be canonized,” the pope said Feb. 19 during an
evening parish Mass.
“I suggest you start small,” Pope Francis told
members of the parish of St. Mary Josefa on the extreme eastern edge of the
Diocese of Rome. “We all have enemies. We all know that so-and-so speaks
ill of us. We all know. And we all know that this person or that person hates
us.”
When that happens, the pope said, “I suggest you take a
minute, look at God (and say), ‘This person is your son or your daughter,
change his or her heart, bless him or her.’ This is praying for those who don’t
like us, for our enemies. Perhaps the rancor will remain in us, but we are
making an effort to follow the path of this God who is so good, merciful, holy,
perfect, who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good.”
The day’s first reading included the line, “Be holy,
for I, the Lord, your God, am holy,” and in the Gospel reading, Jesus
said, “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
“You might ask me, ‘But, father, what is the path to
holiness?’ ‘What is the journey needed to become holy?’ Jesus explains it well
in the Gospel. He explains it with concrete examples,” the pope said.
The first example, he said, is “not taking revenge. If
I have some rancor in my heart for something someone has done, I want
vengeance, but this moves me off the path of holiness. No revenge. ‘But he did
this and he will pay.’ Is this Christian? No. ‘He will pay’ is not in the
Christian’s vocabulary. No revenge.”
In people’s everyday lives, he said, their squabbles with
their relatives or neighbors may seem a little thing, but they are not. “These
big wars we read about in the papers and see on the news, these massacres of
people, of children, how much hatred! It’s the same hatred you have in your
heart for this person, that person, that relative, your mother-in-law. It’s
bigger, but it’s the same hatred.”
Forgiveness, the pope said, is the path toward holiness and
toward peace. “If everyone in the world learned this, there would be no
wars.”
Wars begin “with bitterness, rancor, the desire for
vengeance, to make them pay,” he said. It’s an attitude that destroys
families and neighborhoods and peaceful relations between nations.
“I’m not telling you what to do, Jesus is: Love your
enemies. ‘You mean I have to love that person?’ Yes.”
“‘I have to pray for someone who has harmed me?’ Yes,
that he will change his life, that the Lord will forgive him,” the pope
said. “This is the magnanimity of God, of God who has a big heart, who
forgives all.”
“Prayer is an antidote for hatred, for wars, these wars
that begin at home, in families,” he said. “Think of how many wars
there have been in families because of an inheritance. “
“Prayer is powerful. Prayer defeats evil. Prayer brings
peace,” the pope said.
As is his custom for parish visits, Pope Francis began this
three-hour visit to St. Mary Josefa by meeting different parish groups,
including children, who were invited to ask him question.
One asked how he became pope and Pope Francis said when a
pope is elected “maybe he is not the most intelligent, perhaps not the
most astute or the quickest at doing what must be done, but he is the one who
God wants for the church at that moment.”
Pope Francis explained that when a pope dies or resigns,
like Pope Benedict XVI did, the cardinals gather for a conclave. “They
speak among themselves, discuss what profile would be best, who has this
advantage and who has that one. But, above all, they pray.”
They use their reason to try to figure out what the church
needs and who could provide it, he said, but mostly they rely on the Holy
Spirit to inspire them in their choice.
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