Casting Our Gaze Far Away

Andrea Monda

Pope Leo XIV referred to today’s concerns and restlessness several times during his homily at the Inauguration Mass, which began with Saint Augustine’s Confessions and the famous “cor inquietum” (“you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”). It is not surprising given the vocation and spirituality of Augustinian Robert Francis Prevost, who “confessed” that he had accepted the election “with fear and trembling”.

We should thus set our gaze into the distance without fearing the world and cast our nets into the world: “to carry on this mission, to cast their nets again and again, to bring the hope of the Gospel into the ‘waters’ of the world, to sail the seas of life so that all may experience God’s embrace”. This “fishing” is not an act of proselytism, but rather of love: “It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did”. Christians are salt and leaven, Leo XIV said. Casting our gaze and our nets demands a ‘duc in altum’, going beyond our fences where the water is low and calm, challenging the waves in the open sea: “This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off within our small groups, or feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people”.

All people, no one excluded. The Catholic path is not a solitary adventure but an experience to be shared together. “This is the path to follow together, among ourselves but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of good will, in order to build a new world where peace reigns”! Peace is the horizon towards which to journey, as Pope Leo pointed out in his very first greeting (“Peace be with you all”). It is not separate from the “restless” that must be nurtured. Indeed, peace is not the “calm” that settles all restlessness, but rather the anchor on which Christian hope is founded — faith in Jesus and in his love. There is thus a meeting between two types of restlessness: the restless seekers of God are our brothers and sisters, in unity with authentic believers who know this restlessness well and do not fear it.

Christians themselves have a restless conscience, and thanks to it, they provoke, question and challenge the world, with humble courage so that it may never lose guardianship over everything that is human, starting from the dignity of life. This restlessness is nurtured in a courageous and trusting dialogue between Catholics and the contemporary world, which is often lost, confused, divided and wounded. Dialogue is the way that leads to the lake’s shore, beyond which the Lord is waiting for us, ready to cook fish for his “children” (John 21:4-10). At the end of his homily, the Successor of Peter invited us to navigate and to become “a missionary Church that opens its arms to the world, proclaims the word, allows itself to be made ‘restless’ by history, and becomes a leaven of harmony for humanity”.