- Feb 5, 2002
- 166,616
- 56,252
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Feeling sad, disappointed or ashamed of oneself sometimes is normal and even can lead to conversion, but when people wallow in their sadness it becomes a dangerous vice, Pope Francis said.
“We all go through ordeals that generate sorrow in us, because life makes us formulate dreams that are then shattered,” the pope said during his weekly general audience Feb. 7. While some people, “after a time of turmoil, rely on hope,” others “wallow in melancholy, allowing it to fester in their hearts.”
When “sadness is the pleasure of non-pleasure,” he said, it goes from being a natural emotion to being “an evil state of mind.”
Continuing his series of audience talks on vices and virtues, the pope looked at how nurturing the “type of sorrow that creeps into the soul and prostrates it in a state of despondency” is a denial of the deep-seated hope that faith in God should produce.
Pope Francis said it is like taking a piece of candy that is “bitter, bitter, bitter, without sugar, awful, and sucking on that candy.”
The kind of sorrow that leads one to lose hope in God “must be fought resolutely and with every strength, because it comes from the evil one,” he said. “It is a devious demon, that sorrow. The fathers of the desert described it as a worm of the heart, which erodes and hollows out its host.”
The sorrow of sin
Continued below.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
“We all go through ordeals that generate sorrow in us, because life makes us formulate dreams that are then shattered,” the pope said during his weekly general audience Feb. 7. While some people, “after a time of turmoil, rely on hope,” others “wallow in melancholy, allowing it to fester in their hearts.”
When “sadness is the pleasure of non-pleasure,” he said, it goes from being a natural emotion to being “an evil state of mind.”
Continuing his series of audience talks on vices and virtues, the pope looked at how nurturing the “type of sorrow that creeps into the soul and prostrates it in a state of despondency” is a denial of the deep-seated hope that faith in God should produce.
Pope Francis said it is like taking a piece of candy that is “bitter, bitter, bitter, without sugar, awful, and sucking on that candy.”
The kind of sorrow that leads one to lose hope in God “must be fought resolutely and with every strength, because it comes from the evil one,” he said. “It is a devious demon, that sorrow. The fathers of the desert described it as a worm of the heart, which erodes and hollows out its host.”
The sorrow of sin
Continued below.
Pope addresses pitfall of wallowing in sorrow
Feeling sad, disappointed or ashamed of oneself sometimes is normal and even can lead to conversion, but when people wallow in their sadness it becomes a dangerous vice, Pope Francis said.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
