02/02/2026
𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗴𝗹𝗮𝗱, 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗻…
-Matthew 5:12
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
This Sunday’s liturgy has us meditate on the Beatitudes (cf. Matthew 5:1 12a), which open the great address called “of the mountain,” the Magna Carta” of the New Testament. Jesus manifests God’s will to lead men to happiness. This message was already present in the preaching of the prophets: God is close to the poor and the oppressed and He delivers them from those who mistreat them. However, in this preaching Jesus follows a particular path: He begins with the term “Blessed,” happy. He continues with the indication of the condition to be so and He concludes by making a promise. The motive for beatitude, namely for happiness, is not in the condition requested — for instance, “poor in spirit,” “mourn,” “hunger for righteousness,” “persecuted” … but in the subsequent promise, to be received with faith as gift of God. One begins from the condition of hardship to open oneself to God’s gift and enter the new world, the “Kingdom” proclaimed by Jesus. This is not an automatic mechanism, but a way of life following the Lord, so that the reality of hardship and affliction is seen in a new perspective and experienced according to the conversion undertaken. One is not blessed if one is not converted, able to appreciate and live God’s gifts.
I will pause on the first beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (v. 4). He is ‘poor in spirit’ who has assumed the sentiments and the attitude of those poor, who do not rebel in their condition, but are able to be humble, docile, open to the grace of God. The happiness of the poor — of the poor in spirit — has a twofold dimension: 1) in relation to goods and 2) in relation to God. In regard to 1) goods, to material goods, this poverty in spirit is sobriety: not necessarily renunciation, but the capacity to enjoy the essential, to share; the capacity to renew every day the wonder of the goodness of things, without being weighed down in the opacity of voracious consumption. Humility, like charity, is an essential virtue for coexistence in Christian communities. The poor, in this evangelical sense, appear as those that keep alive the goal of 2) God and the Kingdom of Heaven, making one perceive that it is anticipated in germ in a fraternal community, which prefers sharing to possession. May the Virgin Mary, model and first fruit of the poor in spirit because totally docile to the Lord’s will, help us to abandon ourselves to God, rich in mercy, so that He will fill us with His gifts, especially the abundance of His forgiveness.
-Pope Francis | Angelus | Rome | January 29, 2017
