Papal preacher: Neglecting Mass means losing sight of heaven

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Failing to attend or celebrate Mass is not just skipping a religious obligation — it is a sign that one’s spiritual hunger is withering, the preacher of the papal household warned members of the Roman Curia.

The Eucharist acts a bridge between the world and heaven, Capuchin Father Roberto Pasolini, the papal preacher, said in his final meditation for the Roman Curia’s Lenten retreat March 14. “And if you consciously begin to not go there, it is a sign that heaven, that destiny, you don’t see it and maybe you don’t even desire it anymore.”

Such an attitude, he warned, “means you’re dying. You’re fixing your gaze on things down here, which are here today and are not here tomorrow.”

The Vatican press office said that Pope Francis was following the retreat by video, though the pope was not visible to the retreat participants.

Father Pasolini encouraged cardinals and senior Curia officials to celebrate the Eucharist with the awareness that it is “the moment in which our lives are absorbed in God through Christ, and so nothing that we have lived through in love and communion is lost.”

The liturgy, he explained, is not just a memorial of the past but a participation in the future reality of heaven.

Drawing on St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, Father Pasolini reflected on how for all people, “our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day,” urging his audience to fix their gaze not on what is visible “but on what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.”

“It is not a matter of having one’s head in the clouds,” he said, “but of discerning among the ongoing processes the one that deserves the most attention and giving it glory, giving it substance.”

In the same way, he said, the Eucharist is not meant to be a “refuge in a kind of nostalgia, in a memory of the past,” but a living encounter that transforms and renews those who participate in it.

“It is not an attempt to remind us of Jesus’ last supper,” he said, but rather an expression of the “certain hope” of becoming the body of Christ, “that unites itself to the head and gradually and continually enters into eternal life.”

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