Cardinal Cantalamessa gives second Lenten sermon

By Deborah Castellano Lubov

The Preacher of the Papal Household, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap., gave his second sermon for Lent 2024 on Friday morning, focusing on Christ as the light of the world.

"For us today, Jesus the light of the world,” the Cardinal acknowledged, "has become a believed and proclaimed truth."

However, he recalled, "there was a time when it was not just this." Rather, he suggested, "it was a lived experience, as sometimes happens to us, when, after a blackout, the light suddenly returns," or when, "in the morning, opening the window, you are flooded with daylight."

Light of the World

Cardinal Cantalamessa asked what the words of Jesus, “I am the light of the world,” mean for us, here and now.

The expression “light of the world,” he highlighted, has two fundamental meanings.

The first meaning, he said, is "that Jesus is the light of the world," as "He is the supreme and definitive revelation of God to humanity."

The second meaning, he noted, is that Jesus "is the light of the world," in that "He sheds light on the world," that is, "He reveals the world to itself; He shows everything in His truth, for what it is before God."

The Cardinal went on to elaborate on each of the two meanings, while acknowledging debates on faith and reason, and other misunderstandings.

Withdraw from what is not God's

As he reflected on Jesus lighting the world, he went on to denounce the phenomenon of worldliness.

"The danger of conforming to this world, of worldliness," he observed, "is the equivalent, in the religious and spiritual sphere, of what, in the social sphere, we call secularization."

"No one, least of all myself," he acknowledged, "can say that this danger does not also loom over him or her."

Cardinal Cantalamessa recalled the saying attributed to Jesus in an ancient, non-canonical writing: "If you do not fast from the world, you will not discover the kingdom of God."

'Do not conform'

"This," the Cardinal said, "is perhaps the most necessary fast of all today: fasting from the world." Yet, he clarified, the world to which we must not conform "is not the world created and loved by God."

That world, rather, the papal preacher clarified, we are called to engage and meet, especially in the poor, discarded, and suffering.

"The change must take place first of all in the way we think," he said, as he recalled St. Paul's exhortation to the Christians of Rome: "Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect" (Rom 12:2).

Combatting worldliness

The Franciscan Cardinal acknowledged there are many causes at the origin of worldliness, but the main one "is the crisis of faith."

"In this struggle against the world outside us, and that inside us," Cardinal Cantalamessa said, "our great comfort is that the Risen Christ continues praying for us to the Father."

Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa's Lenten sermons can be found on Cardinal Cantalamessa's website.