"As he proclaims his total independence from God, the contemporary man becomes a slave to himself and often finds himself in disconsolate loneliness". This was said by the Pope in the catechesis at today’s general audience, all focussed on Lent, "a powerful liturgical time", which "challenges us to give a stronger impulse to our Christian life". "Conversion", explained the Pope, "involves placing oneself humbly at the school of Jesus". Hence the centrality of a question: "Do the conquest of success, the longing for prestige and the search for comfort, when they totally run one’s life to the extent that they push God out of one’s horizon, really lead to happiness? Can there be any true happiness without God?" "Experience shows answered Benedict XVI that one is not happy when one has fulfilled their material expectations and needs" and that "the only joy that fills the human heart is the one that comes from God". "Neither the daily cares not the difficulties of life can extinguish the joy that is born of one’s friendship with God", went on the Pontiff, who thinks "Jesus’s invitation to take our own Cross and follow Him can perhaps sound hard and mortifying for our longing of self-fulfilment", but "it is not", as proven by the "testimony of the saints".
