Jesus offers his love
In his Angelus address last Sunday, Pope Francis said: “Jesus is aware it is not easy to live the Commandments in this profound and total way. So He offers us the help of His love: He came into the world not only to fulfil the Law but also to give us His grace, so that we can do the will of God, loving Him and brothers.
“We can do all with God’s grace! In fact, holiness is nothing other than guarding this gratuity that God has given us, this grace. It’s about trusting and entrusting ourselves to Him, to take the hand that He holds out to us constantly, so that our efforts and our necessary commitment can be sustained by His help, full of goodness and mercy.
“Jesus asks us today to progress on the path of love that He has pointed out to us, and that starts from the heart.”
An ecological and social approach
Commenting on the Pope’s exhortation on Amazonia in La Civiltà Cattolica, Antonio Spadaro wrote: “A central point of Francis’s discourse is the fact that today we can no longer fail to recognise that a true ecological approach is always also a social approach, which ‘must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’ (No. 8). Any discussion of the environment cannot be divorced from that of justice and from listening to the cry of indigenous, river and Afro-descendent peoples. ‘Many are the trees where torture dwelt and vast are the forests purchased with a thousand deaths,’ writes the Peruvian poet Ana Varela, quoted in the exhortation (No. 9).
“The indigenous peoples were often powerless in the face of the destruction of the natural environment that allowed them to feed, heal, survive and preserve a ‘good life’ and a culture that gave them identity and meaning.”
Syria sanctions hurting people
In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Sr Annie Demerjian of the Congregation of the Religious of Jesus and Mary, said: “Now, with the economic crisis, people are saying, during the war we were able to eat a little bit. Now it’s very hard times for us. The [international] sanctions imposed on Syria affect ordinary people. The sanctions paralysed the life of Syria. Everything.
“Things are so heavy on the people. I always think about the West, and how they speak of human rights and human dignity, and at the same time they are imposing sanctions on us. What are they doing? Why do they want to harm the people of Syria? The sanctions, let us be honest, it’s the ordinary people who are suffering from it.”
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)