Sermon for Septuagesima Sunday

Beloved in Christ the Lord.
On this today's Septuagesima Sunday, seventy days before the Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord, we begin the period of Pre-Lent. The color of the liturgical vestments is already violet. The joyful hymn Gloria is no longer sung. The joyful Alleluia has fallen silent. Holy Church directs our thoughts toward penance—something that is extremely unpopular in the modern world, a penance that even Catholics would most gladly forget. After all, for several decades they have been hearing constantly that God is merciful, that we will all be in heaven, that God must save every human being, that hell is empty, or perhaps that hell does not exist at all.

In the year of our Lord 2018, in one of the interviews he gave to his friend, the Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari, an Argentine Jesuit stated—Scalfari asked him: "Your Holiness has never spoken of souls who died in sin and go to hell to suffer eternal punishment. Instead, you spoke of good souls admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?"

And to this Bergoglio replied: "They are not punished. Those who repent receive God's forgiveness. They go among the ranks of souls who contemplate Him. But those who do not repent and cannot receive forgiveness disappear. Hell does not exist; there exists the disappearance of sinful souls."

My dear people, the foundation of morality is that good is to be rewarded and evil punished. Where there is no punishment for evil, where there is no punishment for sin, there is no morality at all.

Hell, my dear ones, is part of Divine Justice. Since there is a reward for souls who were faithful to the Lord God, there must also be a punishment for souls who rejected the Lord God, who trampled upon the Divine Will. And this is, after all, the teaching of the Catholic Church. Recall, for instance, the constitution Benedictus Deus from the year 1336, in which Pope Benedict XII, in accordance with the centuries-old teaching of the Holy Church, stated: "Moreover, we define that according to the general disposition of God, the souls of those who die in actual mortal sin go down into hell immediately after death, where they suffer the pains of hell."

My beloved, a great son of the Franciscan Order, Saint Bonaventure, used to say that even if God revealed to him that only one single soul in the whole world would be damned, he would not give up any penitential practice he had fulfilled in his life, because he could never be certain that he himself would not be that one single damned soul. Thus spoke a great saint. The Blessed Mother, the Lord Jesus, and the saints have repeatedly indicated and warned that hell exists and is not empty. There is no "disappearance of souls." There is a place where there will be, as the Lord Jesus says, wailing and gnashing of teeth. A place of eternal misery, a place of eternal punishment. Saint Peter the Apostle asked in his letter with pastoral concern: "If the just man shall scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?"

Dear faithful, as we begin this period of Pre-Lent, we must realize that if we want to save our souls, we must cooperate with divine grace. We must profess the Catholic faith and live in the state of sanctifying grace. The Savior warns us in the Gospel: "Many are called, but few are chosen." And it is not as it seems to modern man, to the modern Catholic—that we can idle our whole lives away, that "somehow it will be fine." It is not so, my dear ones, that God must save us. It is not so that our future does not depend on how we live here and now.

Look, often when we observe other people—coworkers we encounter at work—we get annoyed seeing how sloppily they work. We think to ourselves, "Surely we would do it much better, much faster." But look: in the spiritual life, are we not similar to such sloppy people? Is it not the case that we supposedly want to improve, but "not today, maybe tomorrow"? We supposedly want to change, but "not too much," so that it doesn't require too much effort, so that it doesn't hurt us too much. And such spiritual laziness has proven to be, my dear ones, a deadly trap for millions of souls. Spiritual laziness has led millions of souls straight into the fires of hell. Postponing penance for later, putting off working on oneself, ignoring Divine inspirations.

Dear faithful, the Lord God loves every human being and grieves when He sees souls falling into the fire of hell. But hell is a human choice. The choice of a person who turns their back on God, who despises His will, despises His law, and prefers to live their own way. The Lord Jesus did everything He could for our salvation. He became man, assumed human nature, offered Himself on the tree of the Cross in an expiatory sacrifice. He remained present with us in the Most Holy Sacrament. He grants us His grace through the seven sacraments. And we all the while—we Catholics—pass by the Savior indifferently and say to Him: "Not now, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a year, maybe someday I will take You seriously. Today I have more important matters on my mind."

Dear faithful, when you want to buy a new car, you are capable of saving for months and years. A woman who wants to achieve her dream figure is capable of eating almost nothing for months. An athlete, for a moment of fame, for a plastic medal or a cup, is capable of training day in and day out for long years, because we know perfectly well that if we want to achieve a goal, we must sacrifice something. We must commit ourselves.

And what about our soul? Our Catholic souls lie fallow like a field deprived of a master. And yet Saint Paul the Apostle admonishes us: "Every man that striveth for the mastery, refraineth himself from all things: and they indeed that they may receive a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible one."

On this Septuagesima Sunday of the year of our Lord 2026, the alarm clock is ringing—perhaps for the last time—to rouse us from our spiritual sleep, from our spiritual lethargy, from our spiritual laziness, and to pull us into a spiritual marathon in which we should run so as to deserve the incorruptible crown, the eternal crown, the reward of eternal life. And perhaps this is your last chance to tend to the weed-overgrown field of your soul.

It does not matter whether you are young or old, poor or rich; it does not matter what you do in life; it does not matter what your life has looked like until now. Today, the Divine Savior calls every human being to His service. Today, the Divine Householder wishes to agree with us for the denarius of eternal life. And it is important that we work in the Lord's vineyard—in the time we still have left here—as solidly and as zealously as possible; that we respond seriously and with all our strength to this call from the lips of the Divine Householder—the Divine Householder who perfectly knows our weakness, our frailty, our sins, and our past, but who nevertheless does not stop calling frail man to His service.

May none of us have to be ashamed of our laziness at the Last Judgment. May none of us, my dear ones, have to be ashamed that we sat idly when the Lord Jesus was calling and inviting us to work in His vineyard. May none of us have to be ashamed of our indifference toward the salvation of our own soul.

Tempus fugit, aeternitas manet. Time flees, eternity awaits. Amen.



All AI voice and translation. Original Polish is on the Bishops Channel : https://www.youtube.com/@katolickiruchoporu6394