New creation: The shelter we live in

I remember that as a kid, I struggled with the notion of Original Sin. I am not sure if it was the way it was taught or my simple mind, but I thought it unfair to slap a sin on a newborn child. Today, I understand it not as a personal fault or sin, but that a child is born into a wounded world. How many times have we said that our youth today have a lot more to deal with than we did? Our society is wounded; it is ill, and, dare I say, sinful. That is not a Democrat or Republican thing; not right or left — it is all of us contributing to a world in which too many are suffering. 

The other day, at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, I was talking with a young man of only 15 years old who told me he had been in over 20 different group homes and foster homes. Another young man who comes to the PBMR Center almost daily says he had been in 14 different schools before his high school years. When asked why, he responded that his mother was unable to keep up with all the bills. 

“We kept being put out with nowhere to go.”  

So often, the focus is on the individual faults or failings: a mother unable to care properly for her children, single parent families, and so on, but we overlook the societal sins that wreak havoc on families and communities; the fact that so many have so much, and others struggle to make do from day to day. 

Pope Leo XIV has recently put out an Apostolic Exhortation — a Pope’s call to the faithful for virtue — entitled Dilexi Te, or, “I have loved you.” It is a continuation of the Encyclical — a stronger call from the Pope to all bishops of the Church — that Pope Francis wrote, Dilexit Nos, or, “He loved us.” In this, Pope Leo’s first exhortation, he states that the “love of the Lord, then, is one with the love of the poor.” 

Explaining his choice of that name, Pope Francis related how, after his election, a Cardinal friend of his embraced him, kissed him, and told him, “Do not forget the poor.”  He obviously took that to heart in choosing the name Francis after St. Francis of Assisi. 

Our love for one another brings us closer to a God who is love. 

Fr. David Kelly 
Executive Director

Read Fr. Kelly’s full reflection at pbmr.org/new-creation-the-shelter-we-live-in