Argentina: Cardinal Rossi states that conversion is a Pascual event

In the so -called “Domingo de la Alegría”, a date that the Church has in Lent to live the advance of the Pascual Joy, Cardinal Angel Rossi, Archbishop of Córdoba (Argentina), reflected on the gospel in which Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son or the merciful father.

In his homilythe purple mentioned that the liturgy of the day presents a “double party.” On the one hand, “the feast of the people of Israel that after 40 years enters the promised land” and, in the Gospel, “the party that the father makes of the prodigal son who has returned home.”

When referring to the people of Israel, Cardinal Rossi recalled that “while they were walking through the desert, although they went to the promised land, to liberation, sometimes temptation is to look back and long for garlic and onions, forgetting that it was a food way of slavery, that you have to leave garlic and onions, the food of slavery, and aspire to the food of the promised land.”

“It is not enough to go out, you have to get. It is not enough to flee something but is to encourage yourself to go to something and especially to someone,” he said.

Then he referred to the “second exodus”, that of the prodigal son, which goes “of slavery – dictated in Creole – of the chiquero, as a symbol of sin, of the distant country says the Gospel, to the Father’s house. A pilgrimage, an ‘interesting’ interesting ‘.

“This face asks for your part and leaves, let’s say, to a messy life, and it is the background, to the point that it envies the pigs. They sent him to work a chiquero,” he said.

“I say: how bad this man has been to envy to the chanches,” the cardinal observed. “When you touch the bottom, it is many times the time where one, touching the bottom of the pool, say, stick the jump up, and the expression is strong: I will get up and go.”

What is my distant country?

“You have to review in our spiritual life what my distant country is when I leave the house with capital letters, when I move away from God; when I ask the inheritance and handle myself alone as saying: ‘I do mine’; when I rock through paths that are not those of the Lord.”

“We all carry that distant country inside, some dispersing, others in themselves, others stopping, others through the offer of everything that is sensuality,” he said. “It would be nice for one to name the personal country,” he suggested.

“This prodigal son, the youngest, is capable of movement. If he gets up and puts herself on the way it means that he is a man capable of movement. Instead the eldest son is a static man, unable to conversion, who is caged in the law. A superb who believes he thinks he is in his place, who perhaps does not have serious sins – many more serious those of the youngest son – but he lives without love, he is a calculator, he is a calculator.

“The greatest speaks of hardness, speaks of punishment; the father speaks of forgiveness, of mercy, of tenderness,” he reviewed.

Check our Pharisaica posture

Remembering that Jesus tells this parable to the Pharisees, Cardinal Rossi said that at this point he compares them to the eldest son. In that sense, he called to “review our Pharisaica vein”, since in the Church this position of “arrange who sits to the Banquet of the Lord, who enters his house, who is worthy of his blessing is often evident.”

“Look who talks with, look with who sits at the table, they said of Jesus,” said the archbishop. “I always say that the same phrase is exact that is said many times referring to Pope Francis: look with whom he joins, looks at who he receives.”

“Therefore, the Pharisee takes care of the stained glass but behind a chiquerito,” he summed up, and said that the challenge “is to leave our chiquero, encourage us to dismantle the back room of our hearts, often a back room even camouflaged goodness.”

Conversion: A step from slavery to freedom

“The conversion, which is what this time of Lent and this jubilee time is trying, is to realize that we are not in our site, that our logic is not the logic of the Lord, that our feelings are not the feelings of the Lord, that our steps are not synchronized with the passage of the Lord.”

The challenge, summarized the cardinal, is to change the route, head, heart, and encouraged to ask for that grace of conversion, which “is not a small adjustment” or a “facade retouching”, but “a Pascual event, a step of slavery to freedom; it is a rejection of the past and an openness to the future.”

“In this Lent something has to die in me, something has to resurrect in me. This son of yours was dead and resurrected, was lying and standing. I hope we can listen to that of each one of us,” he longed for.