For this reason, the Holy Father warned, “almsgiving, prayer and fasting cannot be reduced to external practices, but are paths that lead us to the heart, to the essentials of Christian life.”
Lent: Time to return to the heart
Pope Francis also pointed out that in Lent it is Jesus who invites each faithful to enter “into the secret” to “return to the heart”: it is “a journey from the outside to the inside, so that everything we live, including our relationship with God, is not reduced to exteriority, to a frame without paint, to a covering of the soul, but rather is born from within and corresponds to the movements of the heart; that is, with our desires, with our thoughts, with our feelings, with the original core of our person.”