God’s love for people is at heart of Lent, says cardinal

THE love of God for His people was at the heart of the sermon for Lent, delivered by the Preacher of the Papal Household, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa.
His homily was given in the Vatican last Friday to the Roman Curia and Pope Francis himself.
“For your consolation and mine, Holy Father, Venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters,” Cardinal Cantalamessa said, “This meditation will be entirely and exclusively centered on God.
“The discourse on God, that is, theology, cannot remain extraneous to the reality of the Synod, it can’t remain extraneous to other moment of the life of the church.”
Without theology, the Franciscan Cardinal observed, “faith would easily become dead repetition and would lack the main tool for its inculturation.
However, to fulfill this task, theology itself, he suggested, “needs a profound renewal.
According to Cardinal Cantalamessa, the most beautiful news that the church had the task of proclaiming to the world, the one that every human heart expected to hear, was: “God loves you!”
This certainty, he underscored, must eradicate and take the place of the one we have always carried within us: “God is judging you!”
The truth that “God is love, he insisted, must accompany, like a bass note, every Christian proclamation, even when the practical demands of this love must be recalled, as the Gospel does.
The cardinal then elaborated on mysteries of faith, and on the depth and meaning behind the Trinity, Incarnation and passion, and said “we have to see what the truth that we have contemplated in these mysteries changes in our lives.