Pope Francis's words [View all]

[ancianita]

Last edited Mon Apr 21, 2025, 12:29 PM - Edit history (1)

taken from the last pages of his autobiography, Hope (2025).

"...The Church needs everyone -- every man, every woman -- and we all need one another.
None of us is an island, an autonomous and independent self, and the future is something we can only build together, excluding no one.
We have the duty to be diligent and mindful, overcoming the temptation of indifference.
True love is restless.
It is commonly said that the opposite of love is hate, and this is true, but in many people there is no conscious hate.
The more everyday opposite of God's love, God's compassion, God's mercy, is indifference.
To eliminate a man or a woman, just ignore them. Indifference is aggression.
We cannot remain with our arms folded, indifferent, or shrug our shoulders fatalistically.
We Christians hold out our hands.

Today more than ever, all is connected, and today we need more than ever to reconnect: that harsh judgment that I carry in my heart against my brother or my sister, that wound unhealed, that wrong unpardoned, that deaf prejudice, that angry suspicion, that resentment that only harms me, is a small piece of war that I carry within, is a smoldering ember that needs to be extinguished before it catches fire and ends up leaving nothing but ash. And we need to match the growth of scientific and technological innovation with the ever greater equity and social inclusion. As we discover new distant planets, we need to discover the needs of our brothers and sisters who orbit around us. Only education toward fraternity and concrete solidarity can overcome the culture of "wastage," which doesn't relate just to food and possessions, but first of all to human wastage, those humans marginalized from techno-economic systems that, without us even noticing it, are no longer centered on humanity but on its products.

Many people today...seem not to believe that a happy future is possible. These fears are to be taken seriously but are not invincible. They can be overcome only if we stop closing ourselves up. In front of the iniquity and shame that our time reserves for us, we too are tempted to abandon our dream of freedom...hole ourselves up in our fragile human security, in our reassuring routines, in our familiar fears. And in the end, we abandon our journey toward the happiness of the Promised Land to return to the slavery of Egypt.
Fear is the origin of slavery, and it is the origin of every form of dictatorship, because it is on the exploitation of popular fears that indifference and violence grow.
Fear is a cage that excludes us from happiness and snatches away the future.
But one single man, one single woman is enough for hope to exist, and that man and that woman can be you. Then there is another "you" and yet another "you, and then we become "we."
For us Christians, the future has a name and this name is hope.
To have hope doesn't mean being naive optimists who ignore the tragedy of human evil. Hope is the virtue of a heart that doesn't close itself in the dark, doesn't stop at the past, doesn't scrape along in the present, but can clearly see tomorrow.
Restless and joyous, this is how we Christians must be.
Happiness is always an encounter with others, and those others are always a concrete opportunity to encounter Christ himself. Evangelization, in our time, will be possible through an infection of joy and hope.
When there is "us," does hope exist? No, hope already began with "you." When there is "us," a revolution starts.
When the Gospel truly exists -- not a display of it, not an exploitation of it, but its concrete presence -- there is always a revolution. A revolution in tenderness.
Tenderness means nothing other than this: It means love that becomes close and concrete. It means using your eyes to see the other, using your ears to hear the other, to hear the cry of the young, of the poor, of those who fear the future: to listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of the sick and contaminated earth.
And after seeing, after listening, there is no saying. There is doing.

A young university student once asked me: "I have many university friends who are agnostic or atheist. What must I say to make them become Christians?" Nothing, I said. The last thing you must do is speak. First you must do, and then someone will see how you live, how you conduct your life, and will ask: Why are you doing it? At that point you can speak.
With my eyes. With my ears. With my hands. Only after with speech. In testimony of a life, speech comes after, it is a consequence. Also leave space for doubt -- this too is an important key.
It is no good a person saying with total certainty that they have met God. If someone has answers to all the questions, this is proof that God is not with them. It means that they are a false prophet, someone who exploits religion, who uses it for themselves. The great guides of God's people, like Moses, always left space for doubt.
We need to be humble, to leave space for the Lord, not for our false securities.
Tenderness is not weakness. It is a true force.
It is the road that the strongest and bravest men and women have taken. Let us take it, let us fight with tenderness and with courage.
May you take it, may you fight with tenderness and with courage... I am just one step."