Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in the Holy Land, explained who are the truly blessed, in the reflection he proposes For this Sunday, February 16 on the beatitudes (Lk 6,17.20-26).
The purple of Italian origin indicates that the first thing Jesus does before the people who listen to him – “poor people: sick, hungry, demonized. People wounded by life – it is not “cure them, it is not to help them, but to descend in them and stop. Jesus does not come first to change people’s lives solving problems, healing them all. He descends and stays between them, becomes one of them. ”
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When doing this, the cardinal continues, – which has always encouraged peace and the high fire between Israel and Hamas in Palestine – Jesus gives people “a word capable of giving a new look at their own lives.”
In the Bible, refers to Cardinal Patriarch, “there is only a great bliss that summarizes all the innumerable bliss that are scattered throughout the old and the New Testament: to meet the Lord. This is our vocation, our greatest joy: to know him. This is our bliss. ”
Jesus, the purple continues, “he does not say that the poor will be blessed because they will become rich: this is not the justice he comes to bring. It would continue to be a purely human justice, which would change the fate of all, creating new rich, but also new poor. There would be nothing really new. ”
“The poor are blessed because the kingdom belongs to them, that is, because they can know God. Blessed are, therefore, those to whom life has put in a position to experience God”, Emphasizes.
Cardinal Pizzaballa also emphasizes that “blessed those to whom history has put in a position to understand that any other place where we seek life reveals sooner or later his misleading face: wealth, satiety, happiness, honor and fame” .
“It is not that they are negative or sinful realities. They are simply unable to give eternal life, because they enclose man in a condition in which everything is already present, in which there is nothing more to expect or have hope, ”he warns.
When talking about the great suffering that a person can experience, the patriarch specifies that “he who suffers is not blessed because he suffers, but because that suffering is a great and precious school of truth: the truth that we do not suffice ourselves, of that we cannot alone, that our networks are empty even after a night of work, as we saw last Sunday (Lk 5,5) ”.
“And that’s where the Lord descends and stops,” he concludes.
The reflection of Cardinal Pizzaballa occurs in the middle of the fragile high the fire between Israel and Hamas, and Donald Trump’s proposal, which supports Israel, to take two million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip; and when the release of three Israeli hostages is scheduled on Saturday, February 15.
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.