The Archbishop of Arequipa (Peru), Mons. Javier del Río Alba, encouraged the faithful Catholics not to confuse the “urgent” with what is really important: “to welcome the love of God, to love him over all things and to the neighbor as Christ has loved us.”
In an article sent to ACI Press and entitled “From the urgent to the important”, the prelate indicated that “in the vertiginous rhythm imposed by the consumer society, in which we constantly feel pressured to attend to what is presented to us as urgent, we have less and less time to devote ourselves to the truly important.”
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In other words, “we run the risk of confusing the urgent with the important, usually at the expense of this and, therefore, of ourselves.”
This crisis of priorities, continued, “is exacerbated when, letting ourselves be carried away by that same consumer society, we consider that possessing is more important than being and, consequently, we reduce man, that is, to ourselves and others, to the purely material and we forget our transcendent origin and destiny.”
In this way, “running in search of a temporary well -being that never fully satisfies him, or numb by the material well -being achieved, man runs the risk of, after all, not knowing who he is, where he comes from or where he is going.”
Jesus Christ: Key to meet us
Mons. Del Río later recalled that “the Vatican Council II says that, in Christ, God fully reveals man to man himself and discovers the real sense of his existence (GS, 22).”
That means that “knowing Christ, man knows himself; because to the extent that God is revealed to Jesus Christ, he also reveals to us who we are.”
That is why “the knowledge of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, leads to the understanding of man and guides him in his path in this world” and, in addition, “thus we can explain Christians the deepest reason for our permanent joy.”
Created for love and love
The Archbishop also stressed that “God has created us for love and for love. We come from God and to God we go. There is our origin and our destiny.”
“There is also the deepest meaning of our life: to welcome the love of God, love him over all things and the neighbor as Christ has loved us,” said the Archbishop of Arequipa.
Therefore, the prelate ended, “let’s not let the apparent urgency of this world make us forget this, which is the most important.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.