Let us not be blind to others’ suffering, Pope Leo preaches on Laetare Sunday
March 17, 2026
Pope Leo XIV celebrated evening Mass on Laetare Sunday in the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Ponte Mammolo (video) as he concluded a series of five weekly pastoral visits to Roman parishes.
After speaking briefly about the meaning of laetare (rejoice), Pope Leo preached:
Today in the world many of our brothers and sisters suffer because of violent conflicts, provoked by the absurd claim to resolve problems and differences through war, while we must dialogue without respite for peace. Some, then, even claim to involve the name of God in these choices of death, but God cannot be enlisted from darkness. Rather, he comes, always, to give light, hope and peace to humanity, and it is peace that those who invoke him must seek.
Turning to Christ’s healing of the man blind from birth, recounted in the Sunday Gospel reading (John 9:1-41), Pope Leo said in his Italian-language homily that the healing allows the man to “discover a new world, seeing himself, others and life with God’s eyes.”
“Beyond any abyss into which man may fall because of his sins, Christ comes to bring a stronger light, capable of freeing him from the blindness of evil, so that he may begin a new life,” the Pope said, as reflected on what it means to “see with God’s eyes”:
- “It means first of all overcoming the prejudices of those who, in the face of a man who suffers, see only an outcast to be despised, or a problem to be avoided, closing themselves in the armored tower of a selfish individualism.”
- “In the bystanders, another blindness is revealed, different and even more serious: that of not seeing, right in front of them, the face of God, for which they trade the possibility of a salvific encounter for the sterile security that the legalistic observance of a formal discipline gives them. In the face of such obtuseness, Jesus does not stop, showing that there is no ‘Sabbath’ that can hinder an act of love.
“After all, the meaning of Sabbath rest, for the people of Israel—and for us on Sunday, the Lord’s Day—is precisely that of celebrating the mystery of life as a gift, in the face of which no one can ignore the cry for help of our brother and sister who suffer,” the Pope added.
“Perhaps, sometimes, in this sense, we too can be blind, when we do not notice others and their problems,” he said. “Jesus, on the other hand, asks us to live differently, as the first Christian community had well understood, in which brothers and sisters, constant in prayer, shared everything with joy and simplicity of heart” (cf. Acts 2:42-47).
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