In a Lenten message strong on mercy, Pope Francis has warned the wealthy and powerful that if they ignore the poor, they risk hell.
The Pope’s message for Lent 2016 warned about the corrupting influence of money and power.
And it pointing out that caring for the poor, and not just praying for them, is the path to genuine conversion.
“The corporal and spiritual works of mercy must never be separated,” the Pope wrote.
“By touching the flesh of the crucified Jesus in the suffering, sinners can receive the gift of realising that they too are poor and in need.”
Too often, he stated, “the real poor are revealed as those who refuse to see themselves as such . . . . This is because they are slaves to sin, which leads them to use wealth and power not for the service of God and others, but to stifle within their hearts the profound sense that they too are only poor beggars”.
The Pope counselled against the “illusion of omnipotence”, “which reflects in a sinister way the diabolical ‘you will be like God’ (Gen 3:5) which is the root of all sin”.
This illusion can take social and political forms, as in past totalitarian systems, and more recently “by the ideologies of monopolising thought and technoscience, which would make God irrelevant and reduce man to raw material to be exploited”.
The Pope sounded a warning to “wealthier individuals and societies”, which refuse to even see the poor.
“Yet the danger always remains that by a constant refusal to open the doors of their hearts to Christ who knocks on them in the poor, the proud, rich and powerful will end up condemning themselves and plunging into the eternal abyss of solitude which is hell.
“The pointed words of Abraham apply to them and to all of us: ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them’ (Luke 16:29)”
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