In the prayer of the eve for the World Day of Consecrated Life, in the Basilica of San Pedro this Saturday, Pope Francis urged the priests, religious and consecrated to be “bearers of light” through the votes of poverty, chastity and obedience, living these principles to transform the world with the love of God.
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The light of poverty
The Pope began his reflection inviting the consecrated to be “the light of poverty.” According to the pontiff, by practicing this virtue and making “a free and generous use of all things, it is done for these, bearer of blessing.”
The exercise of poverty in the consecrated, said the Holy Father, rejects everything that “can obfuscate its beauty: selfishness, greed, dependence, violent use and with death objectives.” Instead, he affirmed that he embraces “everything that can exalt her: sobriety, generosity, sharing, solidarity.”
The light of chastity
The second light to which Pope Francis urged to carry the consecrated is the “light of chastity.” He explained that the priests, religious and consecrated that renounce the conjugal love reaffirm “the absolute primacy, for the human being, of the love of God, welcomed with undivided and nuptial heart and indicates it as a source and model of any other love.”
“We live in a world frequently marked by distorted forms of affectivity, in which the principle of ‘what I like’ drives to look for in the other more the satisfaction of the needs that the joy of a fruitful encounter,” he said The Holy Father in his homily.
In this sense, he asked them to procure this virtue in all people, so that “they do not gain destructive phenomena such as the avinagramiento of the heart or the ambiguity of the elections, a source of sadness and dissatisfaction that sometimes causes, in the most fragile subjects , the development of true ‘double lives’ ”.
The light of obedience
Finally, Pope Francis urged them to be “light of obedience”, considering this virtue as “the light of the word that is made of love and response.”
The Holy Father regretted that in today’s society a tendency to “talk a lot and listen little” predominates, which deeply affects family and labor relations.
In response to this, Francisco proposed “obedience enshrined as an antidote to such solitary individualism, promoting, instead, a relationship model based on effective listening, in which to ‘say’ and by ‘hear’ continues the concreteization of ‘acting’, even at the expense of giving up their own tastes, programs and preferences. ”
The Pope concluded his homily inviting the consecrated to live these three virtues to be able to experience the “joy of the gift, defeating loneliness and discovering the meaning of one’s own existence in God’s great plan.”
Diego López Colín
I am a graduate of journalism at the Carlos Septién García school with experience of religious institutional communication. Since 2016 I write for digital media and, since 2018, I report the most important news about the Catholic event in Mexico for the Ewtn news channel. ACI Press correspondent in Mexico since 2023.