Do you want to be Pope? 

“You ask me if, as a child, I wanted to be Pope. Well, Renzo, I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever thought about it. But I can tell you this: ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the desire to dedicate my life to God. I didn’t yet fully know how or where the Lord would lead me. Over time, I came to discover that Jesus was calling me to follow him as a priest, and that this path led through the Order of St. Augustine. But this isn’t just true for me. Every child is a dream of God.”. These words by Leo XIV were spoken during one of the most moving moments of the Pope’s Apostolic Journey to Spain last June. 

Renzo’s innocent and tender question—he was a boy from a vulnerable family—concealed, in the simplicity of its wording, the crucial question for every Christian. 

God doesn't ask each of us if we want to be Pope (thank goodness!), but there is one question He asks all of us, every day of our lives: “Do you want to be a saint?” 

And, day after day, we respond—with varying degrees of success. 

This is the Christian life. 

I recently read that a disciple is someone who changes their routines and schedules… in order to be closer to Christ. 

The disciple sets aside the nets—not because he abandons them, condemning them to oblivion and to the mice, but because he puts those nets to work in the service of the mission. 

Peter did not abandon the boat. He abandoned his reliance on it, his dependence on it, and, by placing it in Christ’s hands, he made it the Church. 

No, God does not ask us if we want to know the ultimate purpose of our lives, nor the trials we will face along the way—perhaps because He knows the consequences of heart attacks. He asks us if we want to collaborate, freely, in His plan, in bringing to life the dream of God that Leo XIV spoke of to Renzo—the one that the Creator holds and nurtures for each and every one of us. 

Bringing that positive response to that call to life is what shapes our happiness, which is always shared. 

A Spanish thinker and writer asserts that human beings have only one pivotal moment in their lives: the moment when they realize who they are—not what they are or what they do, but who they are.

That who is is the content of that “little white stone” in which it is “a new name has been written, known to no one but the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17). 

The name-thought of God, the divine dream that gave us life and that holds all our happiness.