Bishop Barron on Loving an Enemy This Lent

"The three classical spiritual practices that the Church urges us to embrace during Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I would strongly encourage every one of my readers to follow this recommendation, perhaps intensifying each one of the three during the holy season. But there is another Lenten discipline that I would like to put forward, inspired very much by the Gospel readings this week: forgiving an enemy.

"There is enough anger in the Catholic community to light up the eastern seaboard for a year. I say this not to pick on Catholics in particular; I would say it of any group of human beings. We are - all of us - sitting on a lot of unresolved rage. Thomas Aquinas defines the deadly sin of anger in his typically pithy manner as an irrational or excessive desire for revenge. Every one of us has been hurt by someone else, aggressed, unjustly harmed, insulted, perhaps to an extreme degree. And so, naturally enough, we harbor a desire to respond in kind. Now, there is such a thing as justified anger, which is nothing but a passion to right wrongs. . . . That righteous indignation is to be praised. But many of us, let's be honest, cultivate an excessive, unreasonable passion to get back at those who have harmed us. . . ."

In a recent commentary, Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, reflected on how the "Lord is summoning us beyond the desire for revenge, even beyond the strict justice of . . . the 'eye for an eye' principle" and is "insisting that we love those who have made us angry, that we desire their good."

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The Boston Pilot: Echoes: Word on Fire Love an enemy this Lent (26 JAN 16)