Reflecting at the weekly General Audience (September 10) on the crucifixion, Pope Leo XIV stresses that Jesus’ cry from the cross reveals “the final stage of a love that is given up to the very end,” and encourages everyone to avoid seeing crying as a weakness but rather as an act of extreme prayer.
Crying out is, therefore, a spiritual act: it is the first gesture we make when we are born, and it is a means of staying alive.
Crying is a part of life–when we suffer, when we love, when we call out to others, etc. Pope Leo stressed that crying “is saying who we are, that we do not want to fade away in silence, that we still have some-thing to offer.”
In the difficult mo-ments of life, Jesus’ cry on the cross shows us “not to be afraid” to do the same. “A cry is never pointless, if it is born of love,” the Pope urged, stressing that if addressed to God, a cry will not be ignored. Crying means rejecting cyni-cism and carrying on the belief that a different world is possible.
Closing, Pope Leo invited everyone to gen-uinely cry out in the midst of trial, because if we make a cry to open our hearts, “it can be the threshold of a new light, of a new birth.”
