Pope Francis: True faith opens the mind and the heart

Pope Francis waves to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his Angelus address on Aug. 4, 2024. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Aug 11, 2024 / 08:45 am (CNA).

Pope Francis urged people to truly listen to God’s voice rather than looking to the Lord for a confirmation of their own ideas in his Angelus address on Sunday.

“Brothers and sisters, when faith and prayer are true, they open the mind and the heart; they do not close them,” Pope Francis said on Aug. 11.

Speaking from the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, the pope asked people to be aware of the temptation of looking to God “for a confirmation of what we think,” rather than “truly listening to what the Lord has to say to us.”

“This way of addressing God does not help us to truly encounter Him, nor to open ourselves up to the gift of His light and His grace, in order to grow in goodness, to do His will and to  overcome failings and difficulties,” he said.

“Let us ask ourselves, then: in my life of faith, am I capable of being truly silent within myself and listening to God? Am I willing to welcome His voice beyond my own mindset and also with His help to overcome my fears?”

Pope Francis asked the Virgin Mary for her intercession to help Christians to listen with faith to the Lord’s voice and “to do His will courageously.”

The pope offered this reflection in his meditation on Sunday’s Gospel, in which the Judeans murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

Francis said: “They are convinced that Jesus cannot have come from heaven, because he is the son of a carpenter and because his mother and his relatives are common people, familiar, normal people, like many others.”

“They are obstructed in their faith by their preconception of his humble origins and the presumption, therefore, that they have nothing to learn from him. … Beware of preconceptions and presumption,” he warned. 

After leading the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square in the Angelus prayer in Latin, the pope offered his greetings to a group of students who walked more than 100 miles from the Italian town of Assisi in pilgrimage to the Vatican. 

Pope Francis asked people to pray especially for the victims of a plane crash in Brazil on Friday that left 62 people dead.

The pope also marked this week’s 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which killed 70,000 people and 140,000 people respectively and brought an end to World War II.

“As we continue to commend to the Lord the victims of these events and of all wars, we renew our intense prayer for peace, especially for the tormented Ukraine, the Middle East, Palestine, Israel, Sudan, and Myanmar,” Pope Francis said.