Issued by the Catholic Center for Studies and Media - Jordan. Editor-in-chief Fr. Rif'at Bader - موقع أبونا abouna.org

Published on Tuesday, 16 January 2018
Francis to Chileans, “sow peace by nearness, closeness!”

By Andrea Tornielli/ lastampa.it :

The Pope celebrates mass “for justice and peace” at the O’ Higgins Park of Santiago, “we must overcome great or subtle faults and ambitions born of the desire for power and to “gain a name for oneself”

“Peace? It must be sown “by nearness, closeness”. “A peacekeeper knows that it is often necessary to overcome great or subtle faults and ambitions born of the desire for power and to “gain a name for oneself”. Francis celebrates his first mass in Chile in the country’s second largest public park, named after one of the nation’s founding fathers, which covers a surface of over 770 thousand square meters. According to local authorities some 400 thousand faithful have attended Pope Francis’ Mass.

The Bishop of Rome, who arrived aboard the pope-mobile, was welcomed by the choir, led by Father Carlos Srarravazal, director of Radio Maria Chile, now parish priest at Sagrado Corazón, where Father Fernando Karadima, the powerful Chilean prelate guilty of child abuse, used to stay.

The Beatitudes - Francis began his homily - are not the fruit of a hypercritical attitude or the “cheap words” of those who think they know it all yet are unwilling to commit themselves to anything or anyone, and thus end up preventing any chance of generating processes of change and reconstruction in our communities and in our lives”.

The Pope explained that Jesus, “in proclaiming blessed the poor, the grieving, the afflicted, the patient, the merciful… comes to cast out the inertia which paralyzes those who no longer have faith in the transforming power of God our Father and in their brothers and sisters, especially the most vulnerable and outcast”.

Francis repeats that the Gospel asks us not to give in to “that sense of resignation that makes us think we can have a better life if we escape from our problems ourselves”. Against the resignation that “like a negative undercurrent undermines our deepest relationships and divides us, Jesus tells us, “Blessed are those who work for reconciliation. Blessed are those ready to dirty their hands so that others can live in peace. Blessed are those who try not to sow division” … “Do you want to be blessed? Do you want to be happy? Blessed are those who work so that others can be happy.

Do you want peace? Then work for peace”.

Bergoglio added that he could not fail to evoke the “great pastor” Raúl Silva Henríquez, Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, who said, “If you want peace, work for justice”… And if someone should ask us: “What is justice?” or whether justice is only a matter of “not stealing”, we will tell them that there is another kind of justice: the justice that demands that every man and woman be treated as such”.

“To sow peace by nearness, closeness! Francis concluded, “By coming out of our homes and looking at peoples’ faces, by going out of our way to meet someone having a difficult time, someone who has not been treated as a person, as a worthy son or daughter of this land. This is the only way we must forge a future of peace, to weave a fabric that will not unravel. A peacemaker knows that it is often necessary to overcome great or subtle faults and ambitions born of the desire for power and to “gain a name for oneself”, the desire to be important at the cost of others. A peacemaker knows that it is not enough simply to say: “I am not hurting anybody”. As Saint Alberto Hurtado used to say: “It is very good not to do wrong, but very bad not to do good”.