This Sunday, May 24, the feast of Pentecost solemnly closes the Easter season, the fifty days that followed the resurrection of Christ. The Church lives the moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles gathered in the upper room, dispelling fear to awaken boldness and turning silence into courageous proclamation. It is not a pious memory that allows for a colorful mosaic, but an ongoing outpouring that especially challenges us in the delicate times we are living.
The gifts of the Holy Spirit —wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord— are not a list of words from children’s catechesis or spiritual ornaments, but indispensable graces for navigating the confusion of our time. They offer clarity where lies reign, courage where cowardly calculation prevails, and discernment where emotional trends replace the truth.
However, in Mexico these gifts clash with an overwhelming reality. The country revels in a willful obstinacy in evil that no longer hides itself. Corruption no longer seems to disturb us, violence has become normalized as part of the landscape, and indifference to the suffering of others reveals a society that has chosen to coexist with sin as if it were the new normal. Worse still, many in power presume to have already secured eternal salvation despite daily behaviors and sins that openly contradict the Gospel, lying turned into a political tool, selfishness established as a right, and demagoguery justified as “realism.”
Truth is rejected and denied in order to replace it with opportunistic political ideologies or woke trends that promise the same redemptive end without passing through the cross. The illusion is sold that it is enough to join the political cause of the moment to be absolved without sincere conversion or reparation for the harm caused. Thus, grace becomes an alibi and mercy a license. This presumption is a subtle form of practical atheism: God is invoked, yet life is lived as if He did not exist.
Faced with this panorama, Pentecost reminds us of an essential sign: peace. Not the apparent tranquility of complicit silences or hypocritical truces, but the deep peace that only the Spirit can pour out—the peace that reconciles hearts, heals memories, and restores dignity to a wounded nation. Mexico desperately needs that peace which is not decreed by statistics nor proclaimed from the pulpits of morning declarations, but received as a gift that requires personal acceptance and conversion.
Paraphrasing the words of Pope Leo XIV in his message for this solemnity, Mexico is like the upper room, the place of the supper and the betrayal that must be transformed—not in the sense the regime uses those words—and, from a tomb, become for the whole Church a source of resurrection.
In a reality marked by moral disorientation, polarization, and social fragmentation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are essential to resist the temptation of building good with false idols that have already betrayed us and continue to use us.
May the same Spirit who burst forth with wind and fire in Jerusalem burst forth today in our country, consume the sin that masquerades as transformation, and restore us—humble and courageous—to the one Truth that saves through sincere conversion and repentance for all the evils that lead us to the abyss.