(Vatican Radio) Christianity is not simply the study of laws or commands: this is
an impediment to understanding and living the truth that God is joy and generosity.
This was the message of Pope Francis at Mass celebrated this morning in Casa Santa
Marta.
The hypocrites who “lead the people of God down a dead-end street”
Pope Francis said, are the subject of today’s Gospel. The Pope reflected on the famous
passage of Matthew’s Gospel that contrasts the behaviour of the scribes and Pharisees
– who make a show of praying, fasting, and almsgiving – with the path indicated by
Jesus, Who points out to His disciples the proper attitude to assume in the same circumstances:
giving alms and praying “in secret.” “And your Father, Who sees in secret, will reward
you.”
Pope Francis criticized not only the vanity of the scribes and Pharisees,
but also those who impose “so many precepts on the faithful.” He called them “hypocrites
of casuistry,” “intellectuals without talent” who “don’t have the intelligence to
find God, to explain God with understanding,” and so prevent themselves and others
from entering into the Kingdom of God:
“Jesus says: ‘You do not enter yourselves,
nor do you allow entrance to others.’ They are ethicists without goodness, they do
not know what goodness is. But they are ethicists, aren’t they? ‘You have to do this,
and this, and this . . .’ They fill you with precepts, but without goodness. And those
are some of the phylacteries, of the tassels they lengthen, so many things, to make
a pretence of being majestic, perfect, they have no sense of beauty. They have no
sense of beauty. They achieve only the beauty of a museum. They are intellectuals
without talent, ethicists without goodness, the bearers of museum beauty. These are
the hypocrites that Jesus rebukes so strongly.
“But He doesn’t stop there,”
Pope Francis continued. “In today’s Gospel, the Lord speaks about another class of
hypocrites, ‘holy rollers’ [It: quelli che vanno sul sacro]:
“The Lord
speaks about fasting, about prayer, about almsgiving: the three pillars of Christian
piety, of interior conversion, that the Church proposes to us all in Lent. There are
even hypocrites along this path, who make a show of fasting, of giving alms, of praying.
I think that when hypocrisy reaches this point in the relation with God, we are coming
very close to the sin against the Holy Spirit. These do not know beauty, they do not
know love, these do not know the truth: they are small, cowardly.”
“We
think about the hypocrisy in the Church: how bad it makes all of us,” Pope Francis
said candidly. Instead he pointed out another “icon” for imitation, a person described
in another passage of the Gospel: the publican who prayed with humble simplicity,
“Have mercy on me, O Lord, a sinner.” This, the Pope said, “is the prayer we should
say every day, knowing that we are sinners” but “with concrete sins, not theoretical
[sin].” And this prayer, he concluded, “will help us to take the opposite road,” the
road opposed to the hypocrisy that we are all tempted to:
“But all of us
also have grace, the grace that comes from Jesus Christ: the grace of joy; the grace
of magnanimity, of largesse. Hypocrites do not know what joy is, what largesse is,
what magnanimity is.”
The Holy Father concelebrated Mass with Cardinal
Marc Ouellet and Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the prefect and secretary of the Congregation
for Bishops; and with Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia and Bishop Jean Lafitte, the president
and secretary of the Pontifical Council of the Family. Members of the Congregation
of Bishops and of the Pontifical Council of the Family were in attendance at the Mass.