Pope addresses consecrated

The amazed joy of Simeon and Anna at encountering and embracing Christ at the Temple is a virtue that consecrated religious should remember and imitate, the pope said in a homily addressed to religious brothers and sisters. 

He encouraged consecrated religious to renew their consecration with enthusiasm and to scrutinize themselves for worldliness, bitterness, and empty rigidity. 

“Even if we experience fatigue and weariness – this happens: even disappointments, it happens – we do as Simeon and Anna, who patiently await the Lord’s fidelity and do not allow themselves to be robbed of the joy of the encounter,” Pope Francis said in his homily during a Feb. 2 Mass for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. 

The occasion marked the 26th Day of Consecrated Life.

“Let us go towards the joy of the encounter: this is very beautiful! Let us put (the Lord) back at the center and go forward with joy,” the pope said. His homily drew on the reading from the Gospel of St. Luke recounting the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. 

Simeon welcomed Christ in his arms, the pope noted. 

“God placed his son in our arms because welcoming Jesus is the essential, the central point of faith,” he continued. “Sometimes we risk getting lost and dispersed in a thousand things, fixing ourselves on secondary aspects or immersing ourselves in things to do, but the center of everything is Christ, to be welcomed as the Lord of our life.”

Those in consecrated life must not lose their ability to be amazed, the pope said. Simeon had this ability: he uttered words of blessing, praise and amazement when he took Christ into his arms. 

“Ask for the grace of amazement, the amazement at the wonders that God is doing in us, hidden like that of the temple, when Simeon and Anna met Jesus,” the pope told the congregation of religious brothers and sisters.

“If the consecrated lack words with which they bless God and others, if there is no joy, if the momentum is lacking, if fraternal life is only fatigue, if there is no amazement, it is not because we are victims of someone or something,” he said. “The real reason is that our arms do not hold Jesus more tightly. And when the arms of a consecrated person do not hold Jesus, they hold emptiness. They try to fill their arms with other things, but there is emptiness. Clasp Jesus with our arms: this is the sign, this is the path, this is the ‘recipe’ for renewal.”

The failure to embrace Christ means “the heart closes in bitterness,” the pope warned. Consecrated persons who are bitter “always complain about something,” like the community superior, its religious brothers, the community in general or its kitchen. 

“If they have no complaints, they do not live,” the pope lamented. “But we must embrace Jesus in adoration and ask for eyes that know how to see good and see God’s ways. If we welcome Christ with open arms, we will also welcome others with trust and humility.”

The Holy Spirit, the pope said, “makes one capable of perceiving the presence of God and his work not in the great things, in the showy exterior, in the displays of strength, but in littleness and fragility.”

The pope encouraged consecrated religious to scrutinize their motivations and to ask themselves whether they let themselves be moved by the Holy Spirit or by “the spirit of the world.”

“While the Spirit leads us to recognize God in the smallness and fragility of a child, we sometimes risk thinking about our consecration in terms of results, goals, success: we move in search of spaces, visibility, numbers: it is a temptation. The Spirit, on the other hand, does not ask for this. He wants us to cultivate daily fidelity, docile to the little things that have been entrusted to us,” Pope Francis said.

The pontiff offered more questions for reflection: “What love drives us to move forward? The Holy Spirit or the passion of the moment, which is anything? How do we move in the church and in society?”