Far from the cares of the world

True peace cannot be bought. It is a gift from God. A gift that He bestows upon His Church. To obtain it, Christians must continue to entrust the Church to God, asking him to watch over her and defend her from the snares of the evil one, who offers people a different kind of peace – a worldly peace, not true peace. This is the meaning of the reflection offered by Pope Francis

on the morning of Tuesday 30 April, during Mass celebrated in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

But ‘do we,’ the Pope asked, ‘pray for the Church? For the whole Church? For our brothers and sisters whom we do not know, all over the world?’ It is the Lord’s Church, present throughout the world; and when ‘in our prayer we say to the Lord: “Lord, watch over your Church”’, we mean this Church, the Lord’s Church, the Church that brings together “our brothers and sisters”. This is the prayer that ‘we must offer from the heart,’ the Pope reiterated, ‘and ever more so. It is easy for us to pray to ask the Lord for a favour when we need something; and it is not difficult to pray to give thanks to the Lord; thank you for… But to pray for the Church, for those we do not know but who are our brothers and sisters because they have received the same baptism, and to say to the Lord: ‘These are yours, these are ours… protect them’ is quite another matter: it means ‘entrusting the Church to the Lord’; it is ‘a prayer that makes the Church grow’, but it is also ‘an act of faith’.

This is the greatest danger, because ‘when the Church becomes worldly, when she harbours the spirit of the world within her’, when she attains a peace that is not the Lord’s – the peace that Jesus assured us of by saying ‘I give you peace; it is my peace that I give you’ – then she becomes a ‘weak Church, a Church that will be defeated and incapable of bearing precisely the Gospel, the message of the Cross, the scandal of the Cross. She cannot bear it if she is of the world! That is why this prayer is so important and so powerful: entrusting the Church to the Lord’.

“It is not customary for us,” observed the Holy Father, “to entrust the Church to the Lord.” Hence the invitation to learn to entrust the elderly, the sick, children and young people to the Lord, repeating: ‘“Watch over your Church, Lord”: she is yours! With this attitude, he will grant us, amidst our tribulations, the peace that he alone can give, which cannot be bought; that peace which is a true gift of Jesus’ presence in the midst of his Church’, even in times of tribulation: the great ones, such as ‘persecution’, but ‘also the small tribulations of illness or family problems’.

Source: News.va