Pope Leo XIV said that crossing the “narrow door” of the Gospel, which leads to the salvation that Jesus offers, sometimes means “making complicated and unpopular decisions.”
In his reflection on today’s Gospel (Lk 13,22-30), before the prayer of the Mariana del Ángelus prayer, with thousands of faithful in the Plaza de San Pedro in the Vatican, the Holy Father stressed that Jesus “is the measure of our faith, he is the door that we must cross to be saved (cf. Jn 10,9), living his same love and being builders of justice and being constructors of justice and peace.
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Sometimes, Pope León highlighted, “this means making complicated and unpopular decisions, fighting selfishness and lavishing for others, persevering in good where the logics of evil seem to prevail.”
“Condling this threshold, we will discover that life opens up before us as a new world, and, from that moment, we will enter the broad heart of God and the joy of the eternal party he has prepared for us,” said the Pontiff.
The Pope also explained that Jesus does not seek to discourage anyone by affirming that the door of salvation is narrow, but that this serves “to reject the presumption of those who feel safe from their salvation, of those who practice religion and, therefore, they trust themselves.”
“Actually, they have not understood that it is not enough to fulfill religious acts if they do not transform the heart. The Lord does not want a separate cult of life or accept sacrifices and prayers that do not lead us to live the love of the brothers and to practice justice.”
Pope Leo XIV also said that “it is beautiful the provocation that the Gospel brings to us today. While sometimes it happens to us that we judge who is away from faith, Jesus puts in crisis ‘the security of believers’. He, in effect, tells us that it is not enough to profess faith with lips, eat and drink with him celebrating the Eucharist or know the Christian teachings well.”
The Holy Father also stressed that faith is authentic “when it makes us women and men who commit to good and are able to risk for love as Jesus did.”
“He has not chosen the easy path of success or power, but, in order to save us, he has loved us to cross the ‘narrow door’ of the cross.”
To conclude, Pope León encouraged to invoke “to the Virgin Mary, to help us cross the ‘narrow door’ of the Gospel, so that we can open ourselves with joy to the breadth of the love of God the Father.”
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.