Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I hope your Lenten journey has been blessed so far! Please be assured of my prayers for you and your families as you continue in this holy season, hopefully growing closer to God in your prayers and preparing to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus at Easter.
This Lent also finds us, as a Universal Church, celebrating the Jubilee Year of St. Francis of Assisi. We just completed a Jubilee Year in our Church, which brought many blessings and spiritual opportunities for our journeys of faith, and now we have another one. We are celebrating the 800th Anniversary of the death of this great saint of our Church. He is known for many virtues and spiritual disciplines including care for the poor, care for God’s creation (important to note, the two of these are connected!) and evangelization (“rebuild my Church,” the Lord called to him). We also know him as a man of peace. The beautiful prayer of St. Francis that we recite (and sometimes sing) begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…” This is a prayer that should be on all our lips during these difficult times in our communities, our nation and our world.
We have wars or threats of war in the Middle East, South America and Eastern Europe, violent persecution of Christians in Africa, unprecedented political partisanship and strife across the country, and, of course, the tensions and violence around federal immigration enforcement tactics that continue to violate the human dignity of so many of our brothers and sisters. These events can make us anxious, frustrated, angry and sad. We may feel like we need to pick a side and join in all this fighting. But for us as Catholic Christians, there is a different path, the path of being peacemakers, like St. Francis.
What does that look like? Let us go back to the prayer of St. Francis:
Where there is hatred, sow love
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy
In our daily lives, surely there are many moments when we can live out this prayer, choosing to recognize each other as children of God instead of falling into the sin of conflict and violence.
How beautiful it is that we have these great saints of our Church, like St. Francis of Assisi, who give us simple and powerful messages that, even after eight centuries, can guide us through the darkness of our own times.
“St. Francis of Assisi. Pray for us.”