His Holiness Pope Leo XIV at Audience: Only hope in Christ can give our lives meaning

His Holiness Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful from his popemobile (@Vatican Media)

At the Wednesday General Audience, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV reflects on the mystery of life, and recalls that God’s love gives our lives meaning as we participate in giving life to others.

By Devin Watkins

His Holiness Pope Leo XIV continued his catechesis on the theme of hope at the Wednesday General Audience.

He focused on the mystery of human life and the contradictions and promise wrapped up in our existence.

Life, he said, is given to us as a gift which we did not ask for, and every person faces difficulties and obstacles, some to an even greater extent.

“Life has an extraordinary specific character: it is offered to us, we cannot give it to ourselves, but it must be constantly nourished,” he said. “It needs care that sustains it, enlivens it, safeguards it and relaunches it.”

With this aspect of gift comes the human yearning to understand our purpose in life and our ultimate goal.

Living with purpose, said the Pope, means finding direction and hope, which then allows us to never give up despite fatigue and teaches us to trust that our earthly pilgrimage will some day lead us home.

“To hope in life,” he said, “means to have a foretaste of the goal, to believe as certain what we do not yet see and touch, to trust and entrust ourselves to the love of a Father who created us because He willed us in love and wants us to be happy.”

Our world, he added, is filled with a sickness that comes from lack of trust in life, which leads people to fatalism and resignation from finding a purpose.

Living requires courage, and Jesus’ earthly life showed that God wishes to restore our hope, especially of the desperate, excluded, and those who seem distant.

His Holiness Pope Leo XIV then reflected on God’s call for human beings to participate in His desire to give life to others, calling the love between a man and a woman a “marvellous crescendo.”

“God created them in His own image and entrusted to them the mission of generating in turn in His image, that is, out of love and in love,” he said. “Sacred Scripture, from the very beginning, reveals to us that life, precisely in its highest form, the human form, receives the gift of freedom and becomes a drama.”

Our human relationships, he noted, are thus marked by contradiction, as our freedom leads us to perceive others as competitors or threats.

Yet, said the Pope, God remains faithful to His plan for humanity and constantly lifts us up from our blind instinct to violence and discrimination…

This report was originally published on the Website of Vatican News. Please click here to read the full text.