Holy Father Pope Francis while addressing the faithful gathered at Casa Santa Marta for his homily in the chapel of the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta residence, suggested watchfulness, service and gratuitousness as three attitudes that can help us keep clean the temple of the Holy Spirit. His Holiness reflected on the first reading from the Book of Maccabees where Judas and his brothers were re-consecrating the temple desecrated by the pagans and the Gospel where Jesus was driving out merchants from the temple that was transformed into a den of thieves.
As reported by Vatican radio, Holy Father Pope Francis remarked that “How many times we sadly enter a temple- a parish, a bishops’ house and so on, not knowing whether we are in the house of God or in a supermarket, there we have business, including the price list for the sacraments- nothing is free! But God saved us freely, without making us pay.”
His Holiness concluded his homily by asking the faithful to give freely and God will do the rest and exhorted that God will provide what is lacking, by wishing that “Our Churches be Churches of services, free churches.”
