Pope: May Jubilee offer opportunity for ceasefire on all war fronts
Vatican news
Pope Francis writes the foreword to a book by Italian journalist Francesco Antonio Grana who covers the Vatican, titled “Jubilee of Hope.” The Pope writes: “I hope that this time will truly become an opportunity for conversion and for looking at one’s life in the light of the Gospel.”
Vatican News
The Holy Year and the Pope’s dream envisage with hope a world marked by peace, where weapons are locked up in arsenals, where those who manufacture them have stopped profiting from the deaths of others, where the death penalty is not has no scheduled executions and where prisoners are granted. “forms of amnesty or pardon”. Pope Francis highlights these points in the foreword to a new book titled “Jubilee of Hope,” written by Italian journalist Francesco Antonio Grana who covers the Vatican, and to be published by Elledici publishing house .
A Jubilee lived to the fullest
“I sincerely hope that the next Jubilee will be an opportunity for a ceasefire in all countries where war is being waged!” underlines the Pope, as he has done in many of his appeals. “From war, from any conflict, it must be clear, everyone always comes out defeated, everyone!” and “there are no winners or losers, only losers!” he emphasizes, recalling what he said in the Bull of Indiction for the Holy Year “Spes non confindit” (“Hope does not disappoint”).
He explains that hope is not “optimism, nor a vague positive feeling about the future”, but “something else”: “It is not an illusion or an emotion. It is a concrete virtue, a way of life, and it involves something concrete. hope is nourished by each person’s commitment to good. » “Nourishing hope”, continues Pope Francis, has the value of “a social, intellectual, spiritual, artistic and political action in the highest sense of the term. It is putting one’s capacities and resources at the service of common good.
An instrument of grace
This means focusing on the common good, with regard to migrants who experience the paradox of odysseys called “journeys of hope”, which often “transform into real journeys of despair”, with the Mediterranean becoming a “great cemetery”. Or for incarcerated people, since the Pope called for “dignified living conditions” alongside the abolition of the death penalty, deemed “unacceptable because it violates the inviolability and dignity of the person”.
The Holy Year, writes Pope Francis in a passage in the foreword, “is not exclusively an event dictated by a calendar, but a true pastoral instrument that popes, since 1300, have used according to the needs of the time when they were called to lead the Church. »
A time of rebirth
The next Holy Year, in 2025, will see millions of pilgrims cross the threshold of the Holy Door of Saint Peter and the three other papal basilicas. The Pope hopes, however, that this pilgrimage is not simply a tourist visit or the achievement of an objective, as in the Olympic Games. “I hope that it is truly an opportunity for conversion, for looking at one’s life in the light of the Gospel”, and that “this pilgrimage is always accompanied by an act of charity carried out in secret”.
The book also remembers Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis, two young people who will be canonized during the Jubilee. The Pope recalls their examples and their words, exhorting us not to “waste away” on the couch of our life, but to embody, with Jesus in our hearts, the beauty of love which is transformed into service.
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