All of us benefit from remembering our past. A people which remembers does not repeat past errors; instead, it looks with confidence to the challenges of the present and the future.

Lent is a fitting time for self-denial; we would do well to ask ourselves what we can give up in order to help and enrich others by our own poverty. Let us not forget that real poverty hurts: no self-denial is real without this dimension of penance. I distrust a charity that costs nothing and does not hurt.

How many kinds of moral and material poverty we face today as a result of denying God and putting so many idols in his place!

Jesus’ Cross shows the full force of evil, but also the full power of God’s mercy.

Do I take the Gospel message of reconciliation and love into the places where I live and work?

To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love is to open up a horizon of hope.

Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.