Vatican City - At 9 a.m. this morning, in the Paul VI Hall, the Preacher of the Papal Household, Fr Roberto Pasolini, OFM Cap., delivered the fourth Lenten sermon, entitled “The freedom of God’s children. Perfect joy and death as a sister”. The address forms part of the series of Lenten meditations dedicated to the theme: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (2 Cor 5:17). Conversion to the Gospel according to Saint Francis”, which the friar has been giving in recent weeks.
The reflection focused on the ripest fruit of the Christian experience: a freedom that does not coincide with the absence of trials, but with the discovery that nothing - not even rejection, illness or death - can separate us from the love of God. At the heart of the meditation was the well-known Franciscan text on “perfect joy”. Pasolini recalled the dialogue between Francis and Brother Leo, in which the saint rules out the idea that authentic joy consists in success, miracles or recognition. True joy emerges, rather, when a person does not lose peace in the face of rejection and humiliation. This is not a matter of being insensitive to pain, but of an inner freedom that prevents evil from determining a person’s response.
This perspective is directly linked to the Gospel Beatitudes, interpreted not as an unattainable ideal but as a promise already at work in the concrete reality of life. Situations of frailty - poverty, weeping, persecution - become the place in which a fullness of life is revealed, one that does not depend on external circumstances. Happiness, the Preacher explained, is not something to be built, but something to be recognised and welcomed within one’s own experience.
A central passage of the sermon concerned the meaning of wounds in the Christian life, read in the light of Saint Francis’s experience of the stigmata. Pasolini made clear that God does not add pain to man, but transforms the pain already present, making it a space of relationship. Sufferings - misunderstandings, failures, loneliness - can become the point at which a person opens himself to Christ and to others. In this transformation, pain does not disappear, but it loses the power to shut a person in upon himself.
The meditation then turned to the theme of death, reread through Francis’s language in calling it “sister”. This is not a consoling image, but the outcome of a path of reconciliation. The fear of death, which runs through human experience, gradually dissolves when life is shaped by the love of Christ. Seen in this light, death appears as the final act of trustful surrender to the Father. In recounting the final days of the saint of Assisi, Pasolini drew attention to one element in particular: the capacity to receive. Francis, who had made poverty a radical choice, in his final moments accepts being cared for, asking for consolation, allowing himself to be loved. It is here that his freedom reaches fulfilment: not in self-sufficiency, but in the willingness to depend on others to the very end.
The sermon concluded with an appeal to the pastors of the Church, urging them not to reduce the Gospel to an accommodating proposal. Evangelical conversion, Pasolini stressed, does not remove the hardship of living, but opens up a path capable of leading to maturity in Christ and to the freedom of the children of God.
As is customary, the Preacher of the Papal Household will give a further meditation on Good Friday, this time in Saint Peter’s Basilica, at the heart of the liturgy of the Passion, the culminating moment of the Lenten journey.
f.V.B.
Silere non possum