Audience with Pope Leo XIV
We would like to thank Vatican Media for kindly providing the images and photographs of the Audience
Living the Gospel: “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening” (Lk 24:29)
As necessary as food
Mongomo is a small town in Equatorial Guinea, on the border with Gabon. Sister Maria writes: “Living with the people here is a great gift for our community. They are so open to the Word of God.” Every month, the people in the nearby villages look forward to their visit. On Sundays, since there is almost never a priest to celebrate Mass, they meet with some of us to hear the Word explained. More than five hundred gather. On the other hand, only about fifty manage to take part in the parish meetings in Mongomo. It must be taken into account that they have no clocks and no notion of the date, so it is very difficult to arrange appointments, so their presence is not constant. Sometimes they have to travel (obviously on foot) ten or twenty kilometres to get there. It is moving to see that they never get tired of hearing about God. I would like you to hear them tell how they put the Gospel into practice: they are simple, concrete experiences… hearing them is enough to convert you. I have often heard some of them repeat that the Word of God is as necessary to them as food. ”
(Sister Mary – Equatorial Guinea)
Reconciliation
I was particularly struck when I heard the Gospel phrase “If you present your offering on the altar and there you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar and go first to be reconciled with your brother…” I wasn’t on good terms with a certain lady. Summoning up my courage, I went to her. Unfortunately, not only did she not listen to me, but she shouted at me to go away. I felt demoralized and I didn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, my son had received a letter from an acquaintance who wanted to apologize to him because of a small misunderstanding between them a few days earlier. I was surprised: firstly, because my son is so young that he can’t read yet, so I had to read the letter to him; secondly, because an adult apologized so sincerely to him. This inspired me to write to that lady asking for forgiveness. A few days later I receive a phone call from her: “Please, you forgive me!” I went back to her, we cleared up all our misunderstandings and full of joy, we reconciled.
(H.B. – Germany)
compiled by Maria Grazia Berretta
Cover photo: © Saulo Leite by Pexels
Evangelho vivido: “Fica conosco, pois já é tarde” (Lc 24,29)
Easter: The Foundation of the Great Hope
Christian hope is not an escape from reality. It is born in a dark place, in the narrow confines of a sealed tomb, where God has already overturned the judgment of this world. Precisely for this reason, it dares to speak in a time of wars (Gaza, Kyiv, Darfur and Tehran) and of hundreds of millions of people who do not know how they will make it to tomorrow.
Our days are woven with justified expectations: health, a secure job, a measure of peace, a justice that is more than words. But when these become our entire horizon, we either treat them as idols or, at the first serious fracture, we take refuge in cynicism and resignation.
Easter does not erase these hopes; it re-centres them. It roots them in Another and in doing so, preserves them. A love stronger than death does not remove the burden of action; rather, it breaks the anxiety of having to save the world through our own efforts alone.
The final word on history is not ours, nor that of the victors of the day. It is the word spoken over the body of Jesus. And the word of Easter already refutes every claim of death to be definitive. For Paul, the resurrection of Christ is not an isolated episode in Jesus’ biography. It is the opening of a new scene into which all humanity is drawn: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).
The Church Fathers followed this insight without attenuating it: the resurrection is the fulfilment of human nature in its entirety, not the privilege of a fortunate few. In Christ, God already contemplates the fullness of the human family: the faces of refugees in the Mediterranean, of those crossing the Sahara, of civilians hiding in basements in Darfur. For this reason, every wound to human dignity, every discarded body, is not only a social injustice; it is a profanation of a humanity that was conceived and loved within the very light of the Risen One.
© Mourad Saad Aldin by Pexels.com
Paul widens the horizon further: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Rom 8:22). It is not only human conscience that groans, but the soil, the air and the seas. In 2026, the language of “labour pains” no longer sounds like pious symbolism: we read it in floods, in uncertain harvests, in villages forced to move because the water has run out. This groaning takes the form of protest; creation refuses to be treated as disposable material and Easter gives it a voice. In the risen Christ, every exploitation of the earth already appears for what it is: a choice against the future of all.
How, then, are we to live between a fulfilment already begun and a history still marked by too many failures? Not with paralysis, nor with superficial optimism. We live knowing that nothing authentically good is lost: a gesture of welcome, a choice to renounce something, honest work carried out under adverse conditions. Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that “every serious and upright human action is hope in action,” and includes among these efforts working for a more humane world, sustained by the great hope grounded in God’s promises (Spe Salvi, 35).
We can say even more: it is not an external addition to the Kingdom; it is already a visible fragment of it. Fulfilment belongs to God and yet God insists on passing through us as well. When we commit ourselves to refugees, to disarmament, to more humane working conditions, to a concrete and not rhetorical peace, we are not simply “preparing” something for later. We are allowing the life of the Risen One to take shape—humbly and fragilely—within our time.
Easter hope does not remain an idea or a feeling; it takes flesh. The resurrection teaches us that the logic of death has no power to determine the final outcome. For this reason, every war, every system of exploitation, every calculated indifference is already unmasked and stripped of ultimate meaning by the empty tomb.
In the tomb of this world, something has already changed forever: life has begun to rise up through the cracks of history. Not as vague consolation or as a “reward” in some undefined elsewhere, but as a reality that, in Christ, has already been entrusted to humanity and to all creation. In the judgement of God revealed at Easter—a judgment that liberates, not crushes—it is decided once and for all that death will not have the last word over anyone or anything.
This is the great hope.
Happy Easter: a hope that does not remain closed within the church, but engages in history.
Declan J. O’Byrne
Sophia University Institute
Originally published on Loppiano.it
Cover photo: Detail of the stained-glass window at the Maria Theotokos Shrine, Loppiano
Easter eyes
I wish that we could all have Easter eyes
capable of looking
into death, until we see life,
into the hurts, until we see forgiveness,
into separation, until we see unity,
into the wounds, until we see glory,
into the human person, until we see God,
into God, until we see the human person,
into Myself until I see You.
And in addition to this, to see the power of Easter!
(Easter 1993)
Klaus Hemmerle
La luce dentro le cose, Città Nuova, Rome 1998, p. 110.
Photo: © Aakash-Sunuwar by Pexels.com