Monday, March 24, 2025

A Simple Practice

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

A photo of a hand extended to feel blades of grass in a field.

Week Thirteen: Centering, Silence, and Stillness

A Simple Practice

Richard Rohr encourages regular contemplative practice.

To live in the present moment requires a change in our inner posture. Instead of expanding or shoring up our fortress of the small self—the ego—contemplation waits to discover who we truly are. Most people think they are their thinking; they don’t have a clue who they are apart from their thoughts. In contemplation, we move beneath thoughts and sensations to the level of pure being and naked awareness. 

Gerard O’ConnellMarch 21, 2025

Pope Francis greets Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican in this file photo from April 11, 2024. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

“I think that now a new pope begins,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, told journalists this Friday afternoon, March 21. Before a book presentation in Rome, the cardinal said that Pope Francis “is a man of surprises and surely he will have learned many things” during his stay of more than a month in Gemelli Hospital, “and who knows what he will bring out of the hat!”

Cardinal Fernández said Pope Francis is “physically really well” but still “needs rehabilitation.” Asked if he believed the pope would resign, the Argentine cardinal, who is very close to Francis, dismissed the idea: “I truly do not believe it. That no!”