Daily Gospel Reflection
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February 24, 2024
Jesus said to his disciples:
“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies,
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers and sisters only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Many times when we think of how to live out our faith, we think of rules to follow, such as the Ten Commandments or abstaining from meat on Fridays during Lent. Today’s gospel does include moral principles: we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. But Jesus’ commands exceed our ideas of justice and go against our natural inclinations of fairness. Why? Because today’s gospel lays out for us the overarching framework for Lent and, indeed, our moral life in Christ as a whole: “that [we] may be children of [our] heavenly Father.”
The goal of living our faith—and the goal of Lent—is to let God’s adoption of us at our baptism become more and more deeply the foundational identity of who we are. Along the way, we usually become better acquainted with our own weaknesses and failings, of the ways in which we are still spiritual children who have so much growing up to do. But that growth can only happen because it is fueled by God’s love.
As we will most intimately discover at the end of Lent when Christ offers himself on the cross, the nature of God is self-giving love. Jesus tells us today that God is perfect, and that human perfection is a reflection of God’s. This means that our acts of charity make us more and more into children of God because they are acts by which we pour ourselves out to others, regardless of their merit. In this way, we imitate and become more like God. And that is what Lent is all about.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, These are hard sayings: to forego revenge, to give more than is due, to walk the extra mile, to love my enemy! Help me, Lord Jesus, to embrace them and to become the child of God you call me to be. Amen.
Saint of the Day

Blessed Tommaso Maria Fusco was everything you could want in a priest. Though his vocation was born in suffering, it produced new life in imitation of the resurrection.
He was born 1831 in Italy to a pharmacist and an aristocratic woman. His parents were known for their faithfulness, but by the time he was 10, he had lost both of them to disease. An uncle took care of him and provided for his education.
In 1839, St. Alphonsus Liguori was canonized, and his story captivated the young Tommaso. The boy fostered a keen desire to give his life to God in service of the Church as a priest. He entered the seminary in 1847, following an older brother who would be ordained two years later.
By the time Tommaso was ordained in 1855, he had lost several other loved ones—his uncle who had taken care of him when his parents died, as well as a younger brother. In all of this suffering, death, and grief, he gravitated to a spirituality rooted in the image of Christ crucified, which fed him through the rest of his life.
Tommaso was skilled at encouraging people in their lives of prayer, and he opened his home to start a day school for wayward boys who needed an education. He also began gathering adults at a parish for evening prayer together.
Soon, he felt called to preach the good news to a wider population. In 1857, he entered a religious community—the Missionaries of Nocera—and spent several years wandering the region, preaching and ministering. He was an effective and motivating speaker, and gathered people around him to grow in the faith. He even brought priests together to study moral theology to improve their skills in the confessional.
He established several communities of prayer and pastoral action among the laity, and founded a religious community of nuns to care for poor girls and to open an orphanage.
Towards the end of his life, his work was envied by others, even fellow priests, and he suffered attacks on his character and false accusations. He bore these accusations by emulating the patience Jesus displayed in his passion.
Tommaso died in 1891 of liver disease—he had not yet reached the age of 60. The people of Pagani, his hometown, honored him as a true missionary and founder, an “exemplary priest” who worked tirelessly for the salvation of souls. The decree they published noted that “in life he loved the poor and in death forgave his enemies.”
Above all, he clung to the suffering of Jesus, and found there a source of hope, and an example to share his love with equal measure. People who knew him recognized him as a holy man. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001.
Blessed Tommaso Maria Fusco, you saw hope in suffering and helped others find it there, too—pray for us!
Image Credit: Our featured image of Bl. Tommaso Maria Fusco is available for use under the Free Art License. Last accessed December 6, 2024 on Wikimedia Commons.