ROME — Pope Francis said this weekend the coronavirus pandemic should transform people’s lives for the better, opening the way for a “more Christian society.”
“When we get out of this pandemic, we will not be able to continue doing what we have been doing, and how we have been doing it. No, everything will be different,” the pope said in a video-message for the Christian feast of Pentecost, commemorating the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles.
“Out the great tests of humanity — and among them the pandemic — people come out either better or worse. They do not come out the same,” Francis said in his Spanish-language address.
Having suffered the lockdowns, people should be more attuned to the needs of others, he said, and more disposed to tackle the “pandemic of poverty.”
“All the suffering will have been useless if we do not build together a fairer, more equitable, more Christian society, not in name, but in reality, a reality that leads us to Christian conduct,” he continued. “If we do not work to end the pandemic of poverty in the world, with the pandemic of poverty in each of our countries, in the city where each one of us lives, this time will have been in vain.”
“Today more than ever we need the Father to send us the Holy Spirit,” the pope said, because the world needs true witnesses to Jesus.
“Today the world suffers, it is wounded. We live in a very wounded, suffering world, especially the poorest, who are discarded,” he said. “When all our human securities have disappeared, the world needs us to give it Jesus. It needs our witness to the Gospel, the Gospel of Jesus.”
“We do not save ourselves. No one is saved alone. Nobody,” Francis said. “We know it, we knew it, but this pandemic that we live has made us experience it in a much more dramatic way.”
“We have before us the duty to build a new reality,” he added. “The Lord will do it and we can collaborate, since he says, ‘I make all things new.’”
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