During yesterday’s daily Mass homily, Pope Francis warned of the risk of succumbing to a “Christianity without a cross.” The Holy Father concelebrated the Mass with Bishop Valério Breda of Penedo, Brazil and Bishop José Manuel Garcia Corderon of Bragança-Miranda, Portugal.
Also attending the Mass were Fr. Dario Edoardo Viganò, director of the Vatican Television Center, Mons. Francesco Ceriotti, who was involved for many years worked in the Italian Episcopal Conferences and celebrating his 70th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, and staff members of the workshops and installations service.
Pope Francis reflected on the Gospel according to St. Mark, which speaks of Christ walking ahead of the disciples who were “dismayed” and “fearful”. The Holy Father noted Christ’s conduct, who chose to tell them the truth. “The Son of man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and kill him; but on the third day he will rise,” the Gospel reads.
According to the L’Osservatore Romano, the Holy Father told the faithful that the disciples went through the same temptations as Christ did in the desert, “when the devil challenged him to to work a miracle.”
“Today, we risk succumbing to the temptation of a Christianity without a cross. And there is another temptation: that of a Christianity with the cross but without Jesus,” Pope Francis said. This, he continued, was the “temptation of triumphalism. We want triumph now, without going to the cross, a worldly triumph, a reasonable triumph.»
The Holy Father concluded his homily speaking on the danger of triumphalism in the Church and of Christians, saying that a “triumphalist Church is a halfway Church.”
“A Church content with being “well organized and with […] everything lovely and efficient”, but which denied the martyrs would be a Church which thought only of triumphs and successes; which did not have Jesus’ rule of triumph through failure. Human failure, the failure of the cross. And this is a temptation to us all.”
