During the May 31 Mass, he urged the Holy Spirit to make Christians builders of unity. “Grant us the courage to go out of ourselves, to love and help each other, in order to become one family,” he prayed.
Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Virgin Mary and the Apostles in Jerusalem, as narrated in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-22), is regarded as the birth of the Church.
Gift of self and proclamation
Taking a closer look at the day of Pentecost, Pope Francis said that the first task of the Church is proclamation. The Spirit does not want the Apostles to be locked in upper rooms where it is easy to “nest”. Rather, He “opens doors and pushes us to press beyond what has already been said and done, beyond the precincts of a timid and wary faith.”After Pentecost, one thing that kept the Apostles going, the Pope said, was “the desire to give what they received”. In the Church, the Pope said, the Spirit guarantees unity to those who proclaim the message.
The "secret of unity" of the Holy Spirit, the Pope pointed out, is a gift, as He Himself is gift. Hence, it is important to believe that "God is gift", that He acts not by taking away, but by giving.
If we realize that what we are is due to His free and unmerited gift, then “we too will want to make our lives a gift”. “By loving humbly, serving freely and joyfully, we will offer to the world the true image of God.”
Three enemies of self-giving
However, in this gift of self, the Pope noted there are three enemies: narcissism, victimhood and pessimism.Narcissism, the Pope said, makes us concerned only with how we can profit from it. In this time of the pandemic, the Pope lamented the tendency to think only of our own needs, to be indifferent to those of others.
Victimhood, he said, is equally dangerous. Victims complain every day about their neighbours – that no one understands them, no one experiences what they experience and everyone is against them. In the present crisis, he noted, we are experiencing how ugly victimhood is.
Pessimism is an unending complaint that “nothing is going well in society, politics, the Church…”. A pessimist gets angry with the world, but sits back and does nothing. In the current crisis, the Pope said it is damaging to “see everything in the worst light and to keep saying that nothing will return as before”
Famine of hope
“When someone thinks this way,” the Pope observed, “the one thing that certainly does not return is hope.” “We are experiencing a famine of hope,” he said, “and we need to appreciate the gift of life, the gift that each of us is.” “We need the Holy Spirit, the gift of God who heals us of narcissism, victimhood and pessimism.”