Magazine Archives

How many crises, moments of darkness, suffering, enmities, pains… are diluted by looking at Christ crucified, naked and wounded! How many clothes we have left in the life behind which we sweeten reality, hide our miseries, fail to truth, accommodate religion! How necessary it is to look again at Christ crucified with the gaze of a child, without prejudice or complex, appreciating what hurts me and identifies with Him!

Since the beginning of Christianity, St Joseph has occupied a very special place within the Catholic saint. St Irenaeus of Lyon in his treatise Adversus haereses states that just as he lovingly cared for Mary and devoted himself with commitment to the education of Jesus Christ, he also guards and protects his mystical body, the Church, of which Mary is a figure and model. They also exalted his figure, from the brief gospel passages referred to him, other Fathers of the Church such as St John Chrysostome, Saint Jerome and St Augustine.

For the Jesuit priest Raul Arderi, Lent is, above all, a way of preparation for Easter, the feast of life, God’s victory over sin and death in this world. “Living Lent means singing and waiting against all hope: Cuba, joy is coming!”

In his Sunday allocution, Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García, Archbishop of Havana, recalls that Jesus not only purifies us of our sins, but also makes us partakers of his own strength and wisdom. Bringing up recent words from Pope Francis, on his visit to Iraq, he insisted that Christ “frees us in a way of understanding faith, the family, the community that divides, that it contrasts, that excludes, so that we can build a Church and society open to everything and solicitous towards our brothers and sisters most in need.” He strengthens us so that we can resist the temptation to seek vengeance, that plunges us into a spiral of endless retaliation.

It would be good if today we asked each other these two questions: Am I a joyful or sad Christian? And if I’m sad, what are the motives or are they? Circumstantial sadness can affect us, but not invading or nullify us, it may come, but it has no right to stay permanently. Today’s Christians, anywhere in the world, at the social moment we live in, cannot allow the widespread sadness, manifested in recurrent and collective discouraged conformism, to become the endemic, if not pandemic, disease of our time. Thus, on the way to Easter, even on the tortuous paths of suffering and the cross, we never lack the joy of knowing ourselves loved by the Father and saved by Christ the Lord. And may we be able to externalize and communicate the joy of the gospel wherever we live without complexes and with determination.

Weave networks of brotherhood and mercy in Cuba, it is for Sister Onoria Paredes, a great blessing. In Jaimanites and Holy Faith, where his religious congregation is based, he lives daily, in communion with the laity and pastors, liturgical celebrations and the sacraments, fraternity and the practice of the works of mercy with the needy.