Pope Francis: “Spontaneous hospitality and thoughtful gestures communicate something of God’s love,”
Pope Francis has dedicated his Jan. 22 catechesis to the “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity,” stressing on hospitality, which he described as an “important ecumenical virtue.”
The pope, who had completed his catechesis on the Acts of the Apostles the previous week, nevertheless returned to the episode of the shipwreck of Saint Paul in Malta, to which the Week of Unity 2020 owes its theme.
“Spontaneous hospitality and thoughtful gestures communicate something of God’s love,” Pope Francis noted in his catechesis, with 7,000 faithful listening at Paul VI Hall.
This is an “important ecumenical virtue,” the pope said. “The desire to know the experience that others have of God.”
This “recognizes that Christians of other denominations are truly brothers and sisters in Christ” and therefore requires “the readiness to listen to other Christians, to pay attention to their personal stories of faith and those of their communities,” he said.
Hospitality, the pope added, also includes “the desire to know the experience of God in others” and therefore allows us to receive “what the Holy Spirit has sown in our brothers and sisters.”
“It becomes a gift for us as well,” he said.
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