Living Lent with a compassionate gaze

It has been said that the season of Lent is a period of repentace, sacrifice and mercy but the call to being merciful to the point of having a sentiment, heart and eyes like Jesus has never been so evident and concrete as much as this time. A professed christian is called now, more than before to live a coherent life.

The message of Benedict XVI for this Lent 2006 delineates a clear program in living authentically the spirit of Lent guided by the very words of the gospel: "Jesus, at the sight of the crowds, was moved with pity."

The Pope begins this message saying that "Lent is a privileged time of interior pilgrimage towards Him Who is the fount of mercy. It is a pilgrimage in which He Himself accompanies us through the desert of poverty, sustaining us on our way towards the intense joy of Easter."

Benedict XVI continued his message quoting his predecessors Paul VI and John Paul II bringing into evidence their revolutionary teaching on the dignity of the human person affriming that the true content of "humanism" consists in the "fully- rounded development of the whole man and of all men and women." And we should fall -attest the Pope- into the temptation to reduce Christianity to a merely human wisdom, a pseudo-science of well-being. That this secularized world aim at striving for the good of man, but man who is truncated... however, continues the Pope, that Jesus came to bring integral salvation." It is this integral salvation that Lent puts before us, pointing towards the victory of Christ over every evil that oppresses us.

Pope Benedict concludes, "we entrust our lenten journey to Mary, the fount of hope, so that she may lead usto her Son. And the Pope commends to her in particular the multitudes who suffer poverty and cry out for help, support, and understanding and he imparts his special Apostolic Blessing.

May this Lenten message of Benedict XVI may truly be a program not only in our life today but for always. http://http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=83732