Pope says Jesus can heal ‘fatigue of living’ in modernity
Charles Collins/Cru• June 25, 2025
Pope Leo XIV has urged Catholics to trust in Jesus’s healing power in order to deal with the “fatigue of living” that increasingly afflicts modern societies.
Speaking on Wednesday, 25 June, the pontiff cautioned that Christians sometimes approach Jesus in a superficial way, “without truly believing in his power” – a power that includes being able to heal the very real problems and afflictions people face and wrestle with today.
“A very widespread ailment of our time is the fatigue of living,” the Pope said. “Reality seems to us to be too complex, burdensome, difficult to face.
“And so we switch off, we fall asleep, in the delusion that, upon waking, things will be different. But reality has to be faced, and together with Jesus, we can do it well. At times we feel blocked by the judgment of those who claim to put labels on others.
“Today we will again consider the healings of Jesus as a sign of hope. In Him, there is a strength that we too can experience when we enter into a relationship with His Person,” the Pope said.
The Pope also cautioned that we can “walk the surfaces of our churches, but maybe our heart is elsewhere”.
The pontiff made his comments during his weekly Wednesday general audience when he was speaking about the passage in the Gospel of Mark that relates how Jesus healed a woman suffering from a bleeding issue and also raised a man’s daughter from the dead.
“This woman, silent and anonymous, conquers her fears, touches the heart of Jesus with her hands, considered unclean because of her illness. And she is immediately healed. Jesus says to her: ‘Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace.’
“In the meantime, the father receives the news that his daughter is dead. Jesus says to him: ‘Do not be afraid; just have faith.’ He then goes to the house and, seeing that everyone is weeping and wailing, says: ‘The child is not dead but asleep.’
“Jesus’s act shows us that not only does He heal [us] from every illness, but He also awakens [us] from death. For God, who is eternal Life, death of the body is like sleep. True death is that of the soul: of this we must be afraid.”
He ended his speech by noting that Jesus, after reviving the child, tells the parents to give her something to eat.
“Here is another very concrete sign of Jesus’s closeness to our humanity. But we can also understand it in a deeper sense, and ask ourselves, When our children are in crisis and need spiritual nourishment, do we know how to give it to them? And how can we, if we ourselves are not nourished by the Gospel?
“Dear brothers and sisters, in life there are moments of disappointment and discouragement, and there is also the experience of death. Let us learn from that woman, from that father: Let us go to Jesus.
“He can heal us, He can revive us. Jesus is our hope,” the Pope said.
Photo: Pope Leo XIV greets the crowd during the weekly general audience at St Peter’s Square, Vatican, 25 June 2025. (Photo by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images.)