March 23rd, 2026
V Monday of Lent
Fr. Francesco Piloni
May the Lord give you peace.
I am Fr. Francesco Piloni, minister provincial of the Friars Minor of Umbria and Sardinia.
Today’s Gospel brings us, as often happens, before a triangulation. We have the guilty one, in this case the adulterous woman. We have the self-proclaimed righteous, the scribes and the Pharisees, those who always have judgment ready at hand, those who never make mistakes. And then we have the third, the good one, the merciful one, blessed Jesus. The guilty one, the self-proclaimed righteous, the good one. Here we see something very deplorable, ugly: the guilty one, in this case the woman, is used as a pretext, as bait to trap the good one, using sin, human fragility, for the intolerance of goodness. "Teacher, we found this woman in flagrant adultery, the command is to stone her, what do you say?". If Jesus says yes, he goes against the Gospel he preaches, if he says no, he sets himself against Moses and becomes religiously disqualified. This woman’s future is now closed.
This is a truth we sometimes experience when we are judged, it is as if life within us were killed, it is as if we were left without breath, without horizon.
Even remorse for things in the past that were not good can play this role, bringing back to our mind bad things with the conviction that we will never be capable of doing new things, beautiful and fruitful things. It is remorse that imprisons us in a past from which we sometimes think we can no longer escape. In this perverse game, the devil is an artist.
Francis of Assisi also one day, in a powerful way, prays and repeats, thinking of the bitterness of past years, "O God be merciful to me a sinner", and little by little he felt himself flooded in the depths of his heart with ineffable joy and immense sweetness. He began to go out of himself and the anguish and the darkness of remorse that had gathered in his soul out of fear of sin, says Celano, disappeared and he had the certainty of being forgiven for all his faults and of living in a state of grace.
We too can experience all this. How many times do we hear people say, "I am unforgivable, what I have done oppresses me, my future is closed, I no longer see anything ahead of me, darkness has prevailed over hope". Then it is necessary always, always to remember what the evangelist John says in the first letter of John, "If your heart reproaches you for something, God is greater than your heart, the mercy of God is infinitely greater than your heart, than what it reproaches you for".
And it will be Francis himself in the Canticle of Brother Sun to say, "Praised be you my Lord for those who forgive for your love". Everything rests on that expression, "for your love", that love encountered, received, which has become compassion for oneself and for others.
So let us never forget: for his love it is possible to live forgiveness. Forgiveness toward oneself, toward others, and sometimes even toward God in the distorted image we sometimes have of Him.
I conclude by always recalling this: that Christians are born from mercy, and all the saints are born from the confessional. The Porziuncola in the feast of forgiveness always reminds us of this, all in paradise, already here, now in the mercy of God.
To all of you brothers and sisters listening, from the Porziuncola in this Franciscan jubilee year, a prayer, but even more a blessing, that of our seraphic father Saint Francis, so that we may live as reconciled people, capable of building peaceful and peace-giving relationships.
May the Lord give you peace.
