In Canção Nova, the people learned with Monsignor Jonas that rain is the sign of blessing. And this rain that falls right now, is the sign from Heaven that that this retreat was blessed. It is the sign from God also coming through the Church in her liturgy. And today is the penultimate Sunday of Ordinary Time, being that next week, the Feast of Christ the King and afterwards the First Sunday of Advent, a time in which the Church alerts us on the coming of the Lord, saying to us that all will have an end.

During this retreat, we adore, we sing, we pray and we engage in spiritual combat. Also this is the sign that we are walking to the end.

The book of the Apocalypse says that the Devil knows that there is little time left to him, therefore, this combat becomes each time more intense. The Day of the Lord is each day closer; today closer than yesterday. The demon knows this and uses all the means to lead the children of God to be lost.

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The demon uses also men and women to bring the children of God to perdition. You only need to see TV programs and the music industry to perceive how things are done to envolve principally sexuality. Seeing the world as it is, as sensuous as it is in all the media, on all sides. Secular journalism, that wants each time more “blood” and puts each time more tragedies and deaths in our houses [with their programming], does all this to make us more and more anxious and thus makes us more fearful and more consuming.

Even inside of the Church there is entering a “psychologicalism” in the preachings, through which the people cry, they are touched in emotion but they do not change their lives. The enemy of God, has worked through the preaching of priests making it a poetry that changes the lives of no one.

The Celebration of Mass at Canção Nova, Sunday

Perhaps you have encountered a long line and experienced many setbacks here at the mother house of Canção Nova. And the demon perhaps has breathed in your heart saying to you: “Look here, that you must leave here!” The demon also is wroking in order that the blessings of this retreat may be manipulated into a cause for grumbling.

The word today says that the impious will be judged. At times you see those known to be drinking all, in a life of sin and even still they are “prospering” and you think: “But look at me here, I work in the parish, I do part of the pastoral work and nothing happens in my life.” The Word of God affirms: “Behold, the days will come, burning like an oven, when all the proud and wicked will be stubble.”

But brothers, there exists a promise for the just, we cannot be discouraged; God is going to honor our faith! Do not stop, do not be discouraged, do not compare your life with the impious, because the Word reveals that the recompense will come: “For you, that fear my name, the sun of justice will rise, bringing salvation on his wings.”

We need to understand that when the Church presents to us these words in the liturgy, she wants to alert us on the fact that this world will pass, that all in this world will have an end and that we were not made for this world, because the promise of God is our salvation. The time is short and we are seeing the signs that the time of the end is arriving.

The second reading for today, in this vein, also narrates that, already in the time of St. Paul, some of his disciples did not want to work, they wanted to remain only awaiting the return of the Lord. The Apostle Paul exhorted the community of Thessalonica saying that “Whoever does not work, also does not eat.” The Apostle of the gentiles exhorts them and is saying to us that we should not rest in the work of evangelization. If the time is short, then the work should be more intense.

Pope Francis, on the Day of Pentecost, during the encounter with the New Communities Movements, said that he preferred a Church that returned injured, because she went to the roads to evangelize, than a sick Church because if remained closed on itself. We cannot be a comfortable people!

“The Church needs an apostolic fervor that sustains us in the mission of announcing Jesus. I am afraid of the Christian of the parlor,” says Pope Francis in one of his Morning masses. The Holy Father also affirms that there exists many Christians in the Church who do not want to risk and are called the “Christians of the Parlor.” “They do not want to be uncomfortable.” Allow me to ask one thing to you: Are you uncomfortable in your Christianity?

As Jesus says to Paul, I am saying to the Church: Courage!

Fr. Roger Luis
translated from Portuguese