Dear brothers and sisters:
The Lent is the time in which the Church, With maternal solicitude, she invites us to place the mystery of God at the center of our lives, so that our faith may regain its impetus and our hearts may not be lost in the worries and distractions of everyday life.
All the way to conversion begins when we allow ourselves to be reached by the Word and welcome it with docility of spirit. There is, therefore, a link between the gift of the Word of God, the space of hospitality that we offer it and the transformation that it brings about. For this reason, the Lenten journey becomes a propitious occasion to listen to the voice of the Lord and to renew our decision to follow Christ, walking with him on the road that leads up to Jerusalem, where the mystery of his coming is fulfilled. Passion, Death and Resurrection.
This year, I would like to draw attention, first of all, to the importance of giving space to the Word through the listen, since the willingness to listen is the first sign with which the desire to enter into a relationship with the other is manifested.
God himself, in revealing himself to Moses from the burning bush, shows that listening is a distinctive feature of his being: «I have seen the oppression of my people, who are in Egypt, and I have heard the cries of their pain» (Ex 3,7). Listening to the cry of the oppressed is the beginning of a story of liberation, in which the Lord also involves Moses, sending him to open a way of salvation for his children reduced to slavery.
He is a God who attracts us, who today also moves us with the thoughts that make his heart vibrate. For this reason, listening to the Word in the liturgy educates us to listen more truly to reality.
Among the many voices that cross our personal and social lives, those that are Sacred Scriptures make us capable of recognizing the voice that cries out from suffering and injustice, so that it does not go unanswered. To enter into this inner disposition of receptivity means to allow ourselves to be instructed by God today to listen to the voice of the Lord. like He even recognized that «the condition of the poor represents a cry that, in the history of humanity, constantly challenges our lives, our societies, political and economic systems, and especially the Church». [1]
If Lent is a time of listening, the fasting constitutes a concrete practice that disposes one to accept the Word of God. Abstinence from food, in fact, is a very ancient and irreplaceable ascetical exercise on the path of conversion. Precisely because it involves the body, it makes more evident what we are “hungry for” and what we consider essential for our sustenance. It serves, therefore, to discern and order the “appetites”, to keep awake the hunger and thirst for justice, to subtract it from resignation, to educate it so that it becomes prayer and responsibility towards our neighbor.
St. Augustine, with spiritual subtlety, lets us glimpse the tension between the present time and the future realization that runs through this care of the heart, When he observes: «It is proper for mortal men to hunger and thirst after righteousness, just as it is proper for the afterlife to be filled with righteousness. Of this bread, of this food, the angels are full; but men, while they hunger, are enlarged; while they are enlarged, they are enlarged; while they are enlarged, they are made capable; and, made capable, in due time they will be filled». [2]
Fasting, understood in this sense, allows us not only to discipline desire, to purify it and make it freer, but also to expand it, so that it is directed towards God and oriented towards the good.
However, if fasting is to preserve its evangelical truth and avoid the temptation to make the heart proud, it must always be lived in faith and humility. It requires remaining rooted in communion with the Lord, because «he does not truly fast who does not know how to nourish himself on the Word of God». [3] As a visible sign of our interior commitment to distance ourselves, with the help of grace, from sin and evil, fasting must also include other forms of deprivation designed to make us acquire a more sober lifestyle, since «only austerity makes the Christian life strong and authentic». [4]
For this reason, I would like to invite you to a very concrete and often unappreciated form of abstinence, that is, to refrain from using words that affect and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin to disarm language, renouncing hurtful words, immediate judgment, speaking ill of those who are absent and unable to defend themselves, slander. Let us strive instead to learn to measure words and cultivate kindness: in the family, among friends, in the workplace, on social networks, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. Then, many words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.
Finally, Lent emphasizes the communitarian dimension of listening to the Word and the practice of fasting. Scripture also underlines this aspect in many ways. For example, when it recounts in the book of Nehemiah that the people gathered to listen to the public reading of the book of the Law and, practicing fasting, prepared themselves for confession of faith and worship, in order to renew the covenant with God (cf. Ne 9,1-3).
In the same way, our parishes, families, ecclesial groups and religious communities are called to make a shared journey during Lent, in which listening to the Word of God, as well as to the cry of the poor and of the earth, becomes a way of life in common, and fasting sustains real repentance. In this horizon, conversion concerns not only the conscience of the individual, but also the style of relationships, the quality of dialogue, the capacity to allow oneself to be challenged by reality and to recognize what really guides desire, both in our ecclesial communities and in humanity thirsting for justice and reconciliation.
Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask for the grace to live a Lent that will make our ears more attentive to God and to those most in need. Let us ask for the strength of a fast that also reaches the tongue, so that the words that hurt may diminish and the space for the voice of others may grow. And let us commit ourselves so that our communities become places where the cry of those who suffer finds a welcome and listening generates paths of liberation, making us more willing and diligent to contribute to build the civilization of the love.
I heartily bless all of you and your Lenten journey.
Vatican City, February 5, 2026, memorial of St. Agatha, virgin and martyr.
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