The spirit of the world makes everything permissible and leads to corruption – Pope Francis
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The Christian life is to remain in God, following the Holy Spirit and not the spirit of the world, which leads to corruption, and does not distinguish good from evil. Pope Francis resumed the morning celebration of Holy Mass at the Casa Santa Marta and in his homily commented on the passage from the first letter of St. John the Apostle, the first reading in the liturgy of the day, in which the evangelist takes up the advice of Jesus to his disciples: “Remain in God”.
The spirit of the world, is forgetting, because “sin does not turn you away from God if you realize it and ask forgiveness, but the spirit of the world makes you forget what sin is” everything is permissible. Then he said, that in these days a priest showed him a film of Christians celebrating the New Year in a tourist city, in a Christian country.
They celebrated the New Year with a terrible worldliness, wasting money and many things. The spirit of the world. “Is this a sin?” – “No dear: this is corruption, worse than sin.” The Holy Spirit leads you to God, and if you sin, the Holy Spirit protects you and helps you to rise up, but the spirit of the world leads you to corruption, to the point that you do not know what is good and what is evil: everything is the same.
One can “be in the most sinful cities, in the most atheistic societies, but if one’s heart remains in God,” stressed the Pope, this man and this woman bring salvation. He then recalled the episode narrated in the Acts of the Apostles, who arrive in a city and meet Christians baptized by John. They ask them: “Have you received the Holy Spirit?”, but they didn’t even know he was there. How many Christians, commented Pope Francis, even today identify the Holy Spirit only with a dove and do not know that “what makes you remain in the Lord is the guarantee, the strength to remain in the Lord”.
