For Chaplains
Pope Francis and the Knights of Columbus
| This Month’s Chaplain’s Report |
| Faith Formation Program |
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| Father Jonathan D. Kalisch, O.P. Director of Chaplains and Spiritual Development |
Encountering Christ in the School of Pope Francis
Pope Francis, as Cardinal Bergoglio, emphasized how Christmas offers an encounter with the Lord, who comes again to each of us. To meet Jesus requires that we shed all that would hinder our ability to search for and find him. Bergoglio reminds us that Jesus became incarnate for those who were marginalized. It is precisely in those areas of our lives that he came to save us.
Let us encourage our brother Knights to go to the margins and peripheries throughout this holy season through gestures of evangelical charity. May our councils and all of our activities be places where the marginalized are welcomed and where the encounter with Jesus Christ is renewed every day.
The following quotes are from Pope Francis’ Christmas Eve homilies as Cardinal Bergoglio, published in Encountering Christ: Homilies, Letters, and Addresses of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (New Rochelle, NY: Scepter Publishers, Inc, 2013).
• “Jesus is knocking at your heart; Jesus is telling you the same thing that the angel told the shepherds: a Redeemer has been born to you. He simply asks you to listen — or rather, he asks you to seek him.”
• “The sign is the same: look for him where no one else would. Don’t look for him among the lights of the great cities; don’t look for him in appearances. Don’t look for him in all that pagan assemblage that is offered to us continually. Seek him in the unusual, in surprising places.”
• “To meet Jesus one has to make oneself small. Shed all pretension. Shed every ephemeral illusion; get down to the essential, to what promises you life, to what gives you dignity. Lower yourself: do not be afraid of humility.”
• “Lower yourself, take a gamble on meekness, take a gamble on goodness. Look through the foliage of life, and there you will find what no one else understands, a child lying in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes. There you will find Jesus every day.”
• “There’s no entry fee to meet Jesus. If you want to, simply enter. He needs your freedom: he needs you to accept the free gift of salvation. There is no other explanation for this mystery of the Nativity but the gratuitousness with which God comes to meet us.”
• “Look at her, the Mother — so simple and gentle — and ask her to take you by the hand to seek the child, who cannot be found in pride and vanity but only in the simplicity of all that is love, meekness, and goodness.”
• “This is the sign, the password, the signal: a newborn child lying in a manger who calls together all those who are marginalized. And no one can say that he himself is not marginalized.”
• “Close to the crib, then, do two things: first, feel yourself invited to the beauty of humility, of meekness, of simplicity; and second, seek within your heart the ways in which you are on the outside, marginalized, and let Jesus call you from your emptiness, your limitations, your egoism. Let yourself be caressed by God, and you will understand better what simplicity, meekness, and unity are.”
Vivat Jesus!
Fr. Jonathan D. Kalisch, O.P.
Director of Chaplains and Spiritual Development
FrJon.Kalisch@kofc.org
(203) 752-4115