Gratitude and Thanksgiving
- POPE FRANCIS
I accompany you at this moment of pain and difficulty, and I thank God for your faithful service to his people.
In the hope of helping you to persevere on the path of fidelity to Jesus Christ, I would like to offer two brief reflections.
The first concerns the spirit of gratitude. The joy of men and women who love God attracts others to him.... Joy springs from a grateful heart. Truly, we have received much, so many graces, so many blessings, and we rejoice in this.
It will do us good to think back on our lives with the grace of remembrance. Remembrance of when we were first called, remembrance of the road travelled, remembrance of graces received...and, above all, remembrance of our encounter with Jesus Christ so often along the way. Remembrance of the amazement which our encounter with Jesus Christ awakens in our hearts.... Let us seek the grace of remembrance so as to grow in the spirit of gratitude. Let us ask ourselves: Are we good at counting our blessings, or have we forgotten them?
A second area is the spirit of hard work. A grateful heart is spontaneously impelled to serve the Lord and to find expression in a life of commitment to our work. Once we come to realize how much God has given us, a life of self-sacrifice, of working for him and for others, becomes a privileged way of responding to his great love.
This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.
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Acknowledgement
Pope Francis. "Gratitude and Thanksgiving." From Homily at Vespers Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City (September 24, 2015).
This excerpt appeared in the November issue of Magnificat.
Reprinted with permission of Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
The Author
Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 17 December 1936. He became the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and a cardinal in 2011. He was elected Pope on March 13, 2013. He is the first pope to be a Jesuit, to come from the Americas, and to come from the Southern Hemisphere. He is the author of Laudato Si, Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday, The Joy of the Gospel: Evangelii Gaudium, The Church of Mercy, Walking with Jesus: A Way Forward for the Church, and Through the Year with Pope Francis: Daily Reflections.