David: François, you offer us your wishes for this new year.
François: Dear RCF listeners, all my best wishes for this new year. As usual, wishes for good health come first, and this wish can be expressed with particular insistence, Covid obliges. We would like 2021 not to make too many waves, nor a third wave, nor more waves at all. We would like to be definitively freed from the chains, confinement, curfew and masks that marked 2020. We would like to live with our faces uncovered. We wish that our economic, medical, educational, cultural and other worlds be freed from the barriers, confinement, curfews and masks that marked 2020. to return to a normal life. We would like to forget all the obstacles, the trials, the terrible suffering that endanger life itself. But be careful, the end of the crisis will not be a return to the past, as if nothing had happened.
David: Do you want to tell François that Covid would be a privileged moment for change?
François: Yes, of course, we can only hope to emerge from this crisis as quickly as possible, but to this wish, I immediately add another: the wish to emerge from this crisis better.
I make this wish after reading " Let's Dream: The Path to a Better Future", Pope Francis' latest book. It is the book I received as my first Christmas present.
And in fact, to help us emerge better from this crisis, Pope Francis uses a good formula that structures the three parts of his book: it is the triptych "see, judge, act ", dear to the social thought of the Church. According to the Pope, to emerge better from this crisis, "we must see clearly, choose well and act correctly". Each page of this book offers a simple and concrete presentation of such a horizon that attracts us and pushes us to change, now. Such a change is both difficult and exhilarating, because it is a call to the radicality of a conversion carried by kindness and love of neighbor. With the Pope, we can be touched by the testimony of all the good Samaritans who are overflowing with attention and care in times of Covid.
The crisis is an opportunity to cultivate our relationship with the Creator, with Creation, with our fellow human beings, with other creatures. As Pope Francis wrote: “ Covid is the time of our Noah. Let us not waste it”, “the good news is that an Ark is waiting to lead us to a new future”, “the Ark of the bonds that unite us”.
David: Thank you, Francis, for your good wishes nourished by this meditation from the work of Pope Francis.
With Let's Dream: The Path to a Better Future , 2021 opens up hope.
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