Indifference to our neighbour and to God also represents a real temptation for us Christians. Each year during Lent we need to hear once more the voice of the prophets who cry out and trouble our conscience.

Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs.

The annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation will offer individual believers and communities a fitting opportunity to reaffirm their personal vocation to be stewards of creation, to thank God for the wonderful handiwork which he has entrusted to our care, and to implore his help for the protection of creation, as well as his pardon for the sins committed against the world in which we live.

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.

Let Jesus preach to you, and and let Jesus heal you. We are all wounded. Everyone.

Being a Christian means renouncing ourselves, taking up the cross and carrying it with Jesus. There is no other way.

There is never a reason to lose hope. Jesus says: “I am with you until the end of the world.