Thought for the Day – 9 February – Meditations with Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1881-1971)
The Love of Our Neighbour
“A few hundred yards from the centre of a big City, one often finds groups of hovels in which large numbers of families are living, herded together in poverty.
There, in the wintertime, these poor people suffer from the cold and damp and, in hot areas, from the burning heat in summer.
Often their hovels are badly roofed and protect from neither the cold nor the heat.
They are hungry and have not even a loaf of bread to kill the pangs of their deprived bodies.
Not very far away, there are luxurious mansions and expensive villas and up and down the streets, drift splendidly upholstered cars, carrying men and women for whom the only thing in life that matters, is pleasure and comfort.
“Love your neighbour as yourself” the Gospel says.
How far we still are from the realisation of this command!
Men would need to go to these poor hovels to do the Spiritual Exercises.
They would need to live in these places for at least a month.
Many ideas would be changed and many hearts transformed if this were done.
The slums, shacks, caves, shipping and even cardboard boxes and other hovels in which men have to live, bear sad testimony to the fact that the Gospel has not yet been understood by many and that Christian charity has still a long way to go.
Consider before God, if you are responsible, even in some small way, for this wretched state of affairs.
Form the resolution of contributing, as far as possible, to the relief of so much want and suffering.
Now is the time – Lent is nearly here!”
Antonio Cardinal Bacci
PART ONE:
https://anastpaul.com/2020/02/11/thought-for-the-day-11-february-the-love-of-our-neighbour/
PART TWO:
https://anastpaul.com/2022/02/11/thought-for-the-day-11-february-the-love-of-our-neighbour-2/
AnaStpaul 