‘Gospel is not Reserved for a Few,’ Pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — God loves and has prepared a banquet for everyone — “the just and sinners, the good and the bad, the intelligent and the uneducated” — and every Christian is called to go out to the highways and byways sharing God’s invitation to the feast, Pope Francis said.

Before reciting the Angelus prayer Oct. 11, the pope reflected on Jesus’ parable from the Gospel of Matthew about the king who prepared a wedding feast for his son; when the originally invited guests did not arrive, he sent his messengers out to invite anyone and everyone.

“Even those on the margins, even those who are rejected and scorned by society, are considered by God to be worthy of his love,” the pope told the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square to pray with him.

The church as a whole and each of its members, he said, are called to go out to “the geographic and existential peripheries of humanity, those places at the margins, those situations where those who have set up camp are found and where the hopeless remnants of humanity live.”