Learning to be Quick to Listen

In his Angelus reflection on the Sunday Gospel, Pope Francis focused on two actions of the rich young man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. First, the Pope said, the young man runs to Jesus, but afterwards, he goes away. The Holy Father noted the unnamed man initially went “running” to Jesus, urged on, the Pope said, by dissatisfaction or restlessness, despite his wealth. “He is searching for a fuller life,” the Pope said, as is often the case with those who have many riches. Jesus, for His part, looks on the man with love, and invites him to sell everything he has, give it to the poor, and follow Him. “But at this point comes an unexpected conclusion,” the Pope noted: “The man becomes sad and goes away. How great and impetuous was his desire to meet Jesus; and how cold and swift his departure from Him!” Pope Francis said that we, too, are looking for a life of happiness and meaning, but that, like the rich young man, we too often imagine that material goods and ...

In his meeting with his brother Jesuits in Belgium, Pope Francis call secularization a “complex phenomenon” and noted sometimes the Church must “confront forms of paganism.” Speaking to 150 Jesuits in Brussels on Sep. 28, the pontiff answered a question from a member living in Amsterdam, one of the most secularized cities in the world. In his reply, Francis noted he didn’t mean a paganism like the one in the ancient world. “We do not need a statue of a pagan god to talk about paganism: The very environment, the air we breathe is a gaseous pagan god! And we must preach to this culture in terms of witness, service and faith. And from within we must do it with prayer,” he said in his remarks, which were published in La Civiltà Cattolica on Tuesday. “There is no need to think of very sophisticated things. Think of St. Paul in Athens. It went badly for him because he went down a path that was not his own at that time. I look at it this way,” the pope continued. “We need to be open, to dialo...