By CatholicVote | Created at 2025-04-03 20:31:05 | Updated at 2025-04-04 14:28:17
17 hours ago
CV NEWS FEED // Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, is urging the faithful to open their hearts to the Lord this Jubilee Year 2025, and extend love and compassion to their neighbors, especially to the disabled and their caregivers.
“During this Jubilee Year,” Bishop Conley wrote in a March 28 article of the South Nebraska Register, the Lincoln Diocese news outlet, “we are called to take on the vision of Christ, and see others genuinely, as the Children of God that they truly are, as beloved by Him in a way that is almost incomprehensible.”
The Bishop said that every individual is inherently loved by the Father regardless of their state in life, emphasizing that God’s very being is love itself.
“He sees us,” Bishop Conley wrote, “He knows us, and He loves us; and He asks us to see and know and love others in the same way. This is why He commands us ‘to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself’.”
Bishop Conley encouraged the faithful to embrace the suffering of those with disabilities, stating that loving them and their caregivers is a genuine need of the Church.
“While it can be easy to ‘acknowledge’ someone with disabilities,” he wrote in the March 28 article, “or perhaps even to sympathize with their difficulties, their struggle can be so very different from ours that we don’t know how to respond and see them for who they truly are. The easy answer to this is to move along quietly. The courageous thing is to enter into their trials and accompany them.”
The Bishop also highlighted the importance of maintaining relationships with one’s neighbors, emphasizing that it counteracts the darkness and lies the enemy perpetrates through isolation.
“We need to break into [those who feel isolated] world,” Bishop Conley also wrote, “and speak a word of welcome into their very hearts. If isolation has truly set in, that is a place the enemy fills with lies. We must not abandon our neighbors.”
Bishop Conley noted that Pope Francis has called to recognize people with disabilities this Jubilee Year 2025 on the weekend of April 26. The bishop invited those with disabilities and their caretakers to attend a holy hour of Eucharistic adoration and fellowship May 12, at the John XXIII Diocesan Center.
“It starts with all of us,” Bishop Conley wrote in the South Nebraska Register, “making space in our schedule so that our neighbors are seen, known, and loved, in the same way that each of us is seen, known, and loved by our Heavenly Father.”
