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In the allocution of this third Easter Sunday, Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García, Archbishop of Havana recalled that once the apostles saw the Risen Christ, their doubts were cleared, they lost their fear, they were filled with immense joy, they felt the closeness of Jesus. He began to eat with them and opened their understanding to understand the scriptures. “So that our joy of understanding the words of the Risen One may increase, we eat with Him, just as the apostles ate with Christ,” he said. While described Mass as a great feast, the cardinal and archbishop called for participation in it and communion. “Thus we join Christ and can say as St Paul, ‘I live, but not I, it is Christ who lives in me.’ And when difficulties and problems come, we will act with the joy of the Risen Christ.”

In a world and moment as convulsive as the one we live in, in visibly contradictory societies, we must ask much of the Lord to also open our understanding to us, as to the disciples of today’s gospel. Not only to understand the scriptures, the mystery of his passion, death, and resurrection, the “was necessary” or the “had to be like this”; also to understand the reality that surrounds us, the world in which we live, the society around us. To know how we are to act, in the desire and challenge to be your faithful and credible witnesses, taking the necessary risks and avoiding sterile recklessness. May the strength of his Spirit and the light of his loving presence always remain the coordinates in which we sustain our daily walk.

We share with our readers the brief history of two 17th-century capuchins, who preached against slaveholders in a poor hermitage in Guanabacoa. These are the young Br. Francisco José de Jaca, Aragonese, and the French or Burgundy Fr. Epifanio de Moirans, who were imprisoned for their performance, without plugging, and then deported to Spain. And they were not reduced to preaching or the written word: the silence of the confessional was, so to speak, one of his most effective accomplice grandstands. A simple metal plate, placed on May 18, 2007, in the old hermitage of santo Cristo del Potosí in Guanabacoa (Havana), has since recalled its relatively brief passage through Cuba.

Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García, Archbishop of Havana, in his Sunday allocution greeted the faithful with the same phrase of the risen one to the apostles: “Peace to you”. He remembered that peace comes from knowing that God loves us, and if He loves us there is no need to fear or be afraid. “Peace, he said, comes from feeling that the mission that God has entrusted to us in the family, in the Church, in society, we can fulfill it despite many difficulties, because God himself has given us gifts to fulfill what is in charge. And whenever God gives a gift he gives it as a task.”

“Blessed are those who believe without having seen me.” It is the bliss in which we are included those who have put our faith in Christ forever and, even without seeing him bodily, even involved in doubt and difficulty, we follow in his footsteps. Faith in the living and risen Christ “serves” not to turn away from the world and reality, not to enter into a solitary, alienating and selfish bubble, to have life in his name, to live in truth and in authentic freedom, to open our eyes to the world around us contemplating the wonders of God and also his miseries, to be in solidarity with the pain of the brothers with whom we share life , to whom Christ sends us to be witnesses and servants of his eternal and merciful love for each of them.