Power, possessions and rank do not satisfy the deep desire for real meaning in life, Pope Leo XIV said yesterday. Source: CNS.
“It is only the resurrected Jesus who can give the true and lasting peace that sustains and fills us,” the Pope said in English during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
“We are not truly satisfied with achievements and passing certainties of this world,” he said, “because we are created in the image and likeness of God and through the power of the Holy Spirit we recognise an inexhaustible longing in our hearts for something more.”
Greeting Polish-speaking visitors during the audience, the Pope said he was joining them in asking for the intercession of St John Paul II, whose feast day is October 22.
Calling the Polish-born Pope a “witness of hope and guide of young people,” Pope Leo prayed: “May he inspire teachers, catechists and educators to collaborate with parents in forming the consciences of the new generations.”
In his ongoing series of audience talks on the Jubilee theme, “Jesus Christ our Hope,” Pope Leo reflected on how Christ’s resurrection fulfills the desires of every human heart.
“We live busy lives, we concentrate on achieving results, and we even attain lofty, prestigious goals,” he said in his main address in Italian.
“We would like to be happy, and yet it is very difficult to be happy in a continuous way, without any shadows,” he said. “We feel deep down that we are always missing something.”
However, he said, “we were not created for lack, but for fullness, to rejoice in life, and life in abundance.”
“This deep desire in our hearts can find its ultimate answer not in roles, not in power, not in having, but in the certainty that there is someone who guarantees this constitutive impulse of our humanity; in the awareness that this expectation will not be disappointed or thwarted,” the Pope said.
The risen Jesus “is the wellspring that satisfies our thirst, the infinite thirst for fullness that the Holy Spirit imbues into our hearts,” he said. “Indeed, the resurrection of Christ is not a simple event of human history, but the event that transformed it from within.”
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Jesus provides sustenance, not ready-made answers, Pope says (By Carol Glatz, CNS)
