Pope Francis' Message for Lent

Today, 22 February, we begin Lent with Ash Wednesday. For this journey until Easter 2023, Pope Francis left a message for everyone, inviting us to set out on the journey.

In the message, the Holy Father highlights "Lenten penance" as "commitment, sustained by grace, to overcoming our lack of faith and our resistance to following Jesus on the way of the cross. This is precisely what Peter and the other disciples needed to do".

In this sense, to "understand and embrace the mystery of his salvation, accomplished in total self-giving inspired by love, we must allow ourselves to be taken aside by him and to detach ourselves from mediocrity and vanity", Francis stressed.

We have selected four sentences from Pope Francis' Message for Lent 2023:

1. 

"Lent is a time of grace to the extent that we listen to him as he speaks to us. And how does he speak to us? First, in the word of God, which the Church offers us in the liturgy. May that word not fall on deaf ears".

2.

"Lent leads to Easter: the “retreat” is not an end in itself, but a means of preparing us to experience the Lord’s passion and cross with faith, hope and love, and thus to arrive at the resurrection".

3.

"While our ordinary commitments compel us to remain in our usual places and our often repetitive and sometimes boring routines,  during Lent we are invited to ascend “a high mountain” in the company of Jesus and to live a particular experience of spiritual discipline – ascesis – as God’s holy people".

4.

"Lenten penance is a commitment, sustained by grace, to overcoming our lack of faith and our resistance to following Jesus on the way of the cross".

You can see the full message here.