March 4, 2007
Focus: “Powerful Practices for Lent”
Dear Friend,
In his homily to begin the Lenten Season, delivered in the Basilica of St. Sabina on Rome's Aventine Hill, the Holy Father presented several useful instruments as the condition to live authentic community renewal. They are the three fundamental practices, also appreciated by the Jewish tradition, because they contribute to purify men and women before God. These external gestures, which should be done to please God and not to win the approval and praise of people, are pleasing to him if they express the heartfelt determination to serve him alone, with simplicity and generosity.
Fasting, to which the Church invites us during this time, is not born from motivations of a physical or aesthetic order, but springs from the need the individual feels for interior purification, to be detoxified from the contamination of sin and evil.
Benedict XVI said that fasting educates us in “those healthy self-denials that free the believer from his/her ‘I,’ and makes us more attentive and ready to listen to God and to serve our brothers and sisters…. For this reason, fasting and the Lenten practices of prayer and works of charity, in particular almsgiving, are considered by the Christian tradition spiritual ‘weapons’ to combat evil, evil passions, and vices,” the Pope said.
It’s never too late to begin these powerful practices.
Fondly,
Father Nick Amato
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