papaf

Pope Francis said

<<There are still millions of boys and girls who suffer and live in conditions very similar to slavery. They are not numbers: they are human beings with a name, with a face of their own, with an identity that God has given them.

We cannot be indifferent to everything.

Too often we forget our responsibility and turn a blind eye to the exploitation of these children, who do not have the right to play, to study, to dream. They do not even have the warmth of a family.

The cry of these situations cannot go unnoticed: every child who is marginalized, abandoned by his or her family, without education, without medical care, is a cry!

A cry that rises to God and denounces the system that we adults have built. An abandoned child is our fault. We can no longer continue to live this way: we can no longer allow them to feel alone and abandoned; they must receive an education and feel the love of a family, to know that God does not forget them. >> (5/11/2022)

Papa Francesco
Papa Francesco

About the sofa and happiness

<<... But in life there is another paralysis that is even more dangerous and often difficult to identify, and that we find hard to recognize. I like to call it the paralysis that arises when HAPPINESS is confused with a SOFA!

Yes, believing that to be happy we need a good sofa.
A sofa that helps us feel comfortable, calm, very safe.
A sofa, like the ones we have now, modern, with sleep massages included, that guarantee us hours of tranquility to move into the world of video games and spend hours in front of the computer.
A sofa against every type of pain and fear. A sofa that lets us stay indoors without getting tired or worried.

The “sofa-happiness” is probably the silent paralysis that can ruin us the most, that can ruin our youth the most.

“And why does this happen, Father?”.
Because little by little, without realizing it, we find ourselves asleep, we find ourselves dazed and stunned. .........…
Certainly, for many it is easier and more advantageous to have young people who are dazed and numb and who confuse happiness with a sofa... But the truth is another: dear young people, we did not come into the world to "vegetate", to spend it comfortably, to make life a sofa that puts us to sleep; on the contrary, we came for something else, to leave a mark.

It is very sad to go through life without leaving a mark.
But when we choose comfort, confusing happiness with consuming, then the price we pay is very, very high: we lose our freedom. We are not free to leave a mark. We lose our freedom... Right here there is a great paralysis, when we start to think that happiness is synonymous with comfort, that being happy is walking through life asleep or narcotized, that the only way to be happy is to be as if dazed.

It is certain that drugs are bad, but there are many other socially accepted drugs that end up making us much or more slaves.
Both of them strip us of our greatest asset: freedom. They strip us of freedom.>>
(WYD in Krakow on 7/30/2016)