‘Eternal, not immortal’: The Preacher of the Papal Household, Fr. Roberto Pasolini, OFM Cap, delivers the seventh in his series of reflections for the 2025 Spiritual Exercises of the Roman Curia. You can read a summary of the reflection below.
By Fr. Roberto Pasolini, OFM Cap
Our era has generated an illusion of immortality, fueled by progress and well-being, which leads us to ignore the limits of the human condition. Even the Church, at times, struggles to adapt itself in order to offer a credible testimony of the Kingdom of God.
This ignoring of death manifests itself in our inability to live out the waiting period serenely and in our obsession with hyperactivity and attention to the many fronts where reality demands our attention. The fear of death has made it difficult for us to make definitive choices, fostering disengagement and the illusion of always being able to revoke decisions already made.
Contemporary society has erased the rituals and words that once helped people face death with meaning and courage. Today, dying is often reduced to a media spectacle or a technical problem for medical science. This distancing from the concept of death prevents us from understanding the deeper meaning of life and Christian hope. Saint Francis of Assisi, in calling it “Sister Death,” offers a radical alternative: accepting human finitude as part of a journey that leads to eternity.
Sin, understood as the failed use of freedom, often arises from the attempt to escape life’s precariousness. However, the only true antidote is love, lived in a concrete and profound way, as testified by the words of Saint John: “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers” (1 John 3:14). Loving to the end means accepting limits and transforming them into an opportunity to give oneself without reservation.
Christ did not eliminate death but went through it to show us that it can be inhabited and transfigured. The Incarnation is not only a response to sin but a radical act of love through which God has engaged with our existence. The Gospel of Mark highlights the paradox of a God who saves through the cross, revealing to us that while we are eternal, we are not immortal.
Paul warns the Galatians about the risk of returning to a faith based on fear and law rather than trust in God’s free gift. John exhorts us to discern spirits, recognizing the Incarnation not as an idea but as a concrete way of living reality. The Incarnation calls us to remain steadfast in the trust that reality, despite its difficulties, is the place of God’s kingdom.
Living as children of God and as brothers and sisters to one another is a choice to be renewed every day, with the certainty that love to the end is not only possible but has already been witnessed by countless generations of men and women. This song of love is one we, too, can sing with our lives.
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