Lenten Season Opportunity to Be “conscious of pain of poverty, scandal of inequality”: Cardinal Brislin, South Africa

Johannesburg, 09 March, 2025 / 9:26 PM

The Lenten Season offers an opportunity for the people of God to come to terms with the realities in their respective contexts, including the human challenges such as the inability to meet basic needs and the “scandal of inequality”, South Africa’s Stephen Cardinal Brislin has said. 

In his homily during the Ash Wednesday Eucharist celebration at Christ the King Cathedral of Johannesburg Catholic Archdiocese, his Metropolitan See, Cardinal Brislin called upon the people of God under his pastoral care to practice “small deeds of love” aiming to “bring light and life” to others in their respective contexts. 

The aim of the Lenten Season, he said, “should be to renew our relationship with God, to prune our lives of spiritual slothfulness for new growth and fruitfulness of spirit.” 

Lenten observances, the South African Cardinal emphasized, “must make us conscious of the pain of poverty and the scandal of inequality.”

The Local Ordinary of Johannesburg Archdiocese, who doubles as President of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) emphasized the value of the Sacrament of Penance and the fostering of good relationships with others during Lent. 

The Lenten Season, he said, “is a time to become conscious and seek forgiveness not only for our sins of commission, but especially to become more aware of our sins of omission.”

The Catholic Church leader, who started his Episcopate in January 2007 as Bishop of South Africa’s Kroonstad Catholic Diocese, called upon the people under his pastoral care to approach the Lenten Season with an appropriate attitude.

The Lenten Season is about using “the good things that have been given to us; to use them well and appropriately,” Cardinal Brislin said.

 “There is so much we can do, through small deeds of love and compassion, to bring light and life into the world,” he said on Ash Wednesday.

He went on to caution against laziness, fear, indifference, and prejudice and encouraged charitable acts that make a positive difference in the lives of others.

The Lenten Season “is not something done in isolation,” Cardinal Brislin said, and highlighting the communal aspect of the 40-day period as vitally important, added, “We gather as a people. As we heard in the First Reading: proclaim a solemn assembly, call the people together, summon the community, assemble the elders, gather the children, even the infants at the breast."

In his Ash Wednesday homily, the Cardinal, who was at the helm of South Africa’s Cape Town Catholic Archdiocese before Pope Francis transferred him to Johannesburg last October advocated for the fostering of unity as a “great family of humanity” amid challenges such as “a legacy of greed, selfishness, the pursuit of power and domination.”

He called for prayers for various intentions, including for “the sins of humanity, for the cruelty people inflict on one another, for indifference toward the Creator, and for the harm done to the earth.”

“May we during this Lent grow in our faith, hope, and love, to rejoice in the God who made us, and to delight in the people around us,” the South African Catholic Church leader, who was created Cardinal during the September 2023 Consistory said on Ash Wednesday.