CV NEWS FEED // In his message for Lent, Apostolic Administrator of Harbin Fr. Joseph Zhao Hongchun invited Chinese Catholics to live intentionally according to Pope Francis’ Year of Prayer.
“This year’s Lent requires constantly drawing inspiration from repentance, prayer, and love in daily life with a new perspective for the future,” said Zhao. “Pope Francis earnestly hopes believers can fully devote themselves to prayer in 2024 and prepare for the Great Jubilee in 2025.”
He continued:
For this reason, we will devote ourselves to prayer throughout this year and begin our parish’s ‘Year of Prayer’ during this Lent, rediscovering the central position of praying in religious life […] For us, the period waiting for the arrival of the Jubilee is a time of dedication to repentance, redemption, awakening prayers, and witnessing of love.
Zhao reminded that prayer must go beyond words, “nurturing the prayer of the heart,” and striving to “updat[e] our Chinese ‘chanting’ church to a ‘prayer’ church”:
Externalized ‘chanting’ tends to put us in danger of performing, pretending, and listening only to ourselves, without being able to fully and completely place ourselves before God and surrender ourselves to His gaze. At the same time, such prayers often lead us into the danger of ‘seeking self-interest’, that is, bringing the utilitarianism of the world into the intercourse of heaven and man.
In today’s day and age, he especially warned against the abundance of distraction from mobile phones, which only inhibits one’s ability to “live fully in the presence of God.”
Concluding, Zhao instructed Chinese Catholics to “entrust this Lent to the Virgin Mary, asking her to help us overcome the habits and futile efforts that hinder the Holy Spirit, and also asking her to teach us contemplative prayer: keeping everything in our hearts, thinking it over and over, wishing only that the will of God be done”
