Three themes can represent the Pope's teachings in these weeks that prepare us for Christmas: the poor, prayer and Mary. Francis' preaching is inserted in the events we are living and nourishes the Christian life with what we need most.

On Sunday, November 15, the Pope celebrated the IV World Day of the Poor, workshop , which this year had as its theme: "Reach out your hand to the poor (cf. Si 7:32)".

His preaching centered on the parable of the talents (cf. Mt 25 14 ff.). Each talent corresponded to the salary of about twenty years of work, then enough for a lifetime. All of us," said Francis, "have above all a great wealth: what we are, an irreplaceable image of God. And we have it to serve and to "do good" to others, and not so much to "be good" ourselves.

Secondly, he observed that the servants who "served" are called "faithful" four times, because they took risks. Faithfulness implies taking risks, not playing defensively, perhaps merely clinging to norms or rules that guarantee not to make mistakes. So thought the idler who was called "bad" by his master, simply because he took refuge in his passivity.

Third point: at least that servant should have given the talent to the moneylenders, to recover it later with interest. And for us, the Pope observes, the lenders are the poor. And so he synthesizes the Christian message on this point in a pedagogical way: by showing that, if we attend to them, we gain:

"The poor are at the center of the Gospel; the Gospel cannot be understood without the poor. The poor have the same personality as Jesus, who, being rich, stripped himself of everything, became poor, became sin, the ugliest poverty. The poor guarantee us an eternal income and already now allow us to enrich ourselves in love. (...) The greatest poverty to fight against is our poverty of love".

As Christmas approaches, he invites us to ask ourselves not "what can I buy or have," but "what can I give to others," so as to be like Jesus and thus serve the will of God. In the end, it seems as if Francis wanted to take another metaphor appropriate to our pandemic status , which forces us to wear a mask. He takes the phrase of St. John Chrysostom when he says that after death "all take off the mask of wealth and poverty and leave this world. And they are judged only by their works, some truly rich, others poor". That will be our true reality then, we will be rich by what we have served; and, if not, we will be very poor. Poor in true humanity and in true love.

In his Wednesday catechesis , Francis reflected on the psalms for two days. First (cf. 14-X-2020) he presented them as a school of prayer, because they are the word of God that tells us sample how we can speak to Him. The psalms spring from the daily life of believers, from their joys and sorrows, doubts, hopes and bitterness. And from there - telling the Lord what we are and what happens to us - they teach us to refer all things to him, as Jesus did with God the Father.

At the same time (cf. 21-X-2020), by praying the psalms we learn to respect God and others. They teach us that prayer is not a painkiller, but a great school of responsibility staff. Both when we pray them individually and when we pray them in the temple, the psalms "open the horizon to God's gaze on history". And they also gather the cry of the needy, of the humble, of the poor. This, he adds, is important because we must reject the practical atheism that hides behind indifference or hatred of others, because it is tantamount to not recognizing the human person as the image of God.

Later the Pope presented Jesus as a man of prayer (cf. October 28, 2020), who leads our prayer and includes us in his mission statement. He is also our teacher of prayer (4-XI-2020), for prayer is the rudder of the road, it is listening and meeting with God. "Prayer has the power to transform into good what would otherwise be a condemnation in life; prayer has the power to open a great horizon to the mind and to enlarge the heart". Prayer staff is "an art" in solitude, which financial aid leads us to abandon ourselves into God's hands.

We need prayer because it gives us strength and oxygen for our life, which come to us through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Like that of Jesus, our prayer must be persevering and continuous, tenacious, courageous and humble (cf. 11-XI-2020); even when we feel nothing, even, as happened in the lives of many saints, in the midst of "the night of faith and the silence of God".

The prayer of Jesus, always accompanied by the action of the Holy Spirit, is the living foundation of our prayer. Jesus, as St. Augustine says and the Catechism of the Catholic Church recounts, "prays for us as our priest; he prays in us as our head; to him our prayer is addressed as to our God. Let us, therefore, recognize our voices in him, and his voice in us" (n. 2616). A topic that was very dear to Benedict XVI.

Mary, for her part, is a woman of prayer (cf. 18-XI-2020). She has been praying since she was young, without wanting to be autonomous: "she waits for God to take the reins of her journey and guide her wherever He wills. She is docile, and with her availability she predisposes the great events that involve God in the world".

She, with her "fiat" (let it be done), manifests her permanent openness to God's will. Our prayer should also be like this, simple, trusting, available: "Lord, what You will, when You will and as You will". She does so until the cross and after the cross, as Mother of the nascent Church. It is her silent presence as mother and disciple. Everything that happens passes through the "sieve" of prayer in her heart, which is, therefore, like a pearl of incomparable splendor.

The Lord gave us Mary as our mother from the cross (cf. Jn 19:27), when he was giving us his life and his Spirit (cf. speech at the Pontifical theological School "Marianum" in Rome (24-XI-2020). "And he did not let his work be accomplished without giving us Our Lady, because he wants us to walk in life with a mother, indeed, with the best of mothers" (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 285).

This is why the Church and also our Earth, says Francis, need to rediscover the maternal heart of Mary. All of us "need motherhood, that which generates and regenerates life with tenderness, because only gift, care and sharing keep the human family together. Let us think of the world without mothers: it has no future" (cf. Encyclical Fratelli tutti, 278).

It is interesting to know that perhaps the oldest mariological datum in the New Testament is the affirmation that the Savior was "born of woman" (Gal 4:4).

In the Gospel," the Pope observes, "Mary is the woman, the new Eve, who from Cana to Calvary intervenes for our salvation (cf. Jn 2:4; 19:26)". Finally, she is also the woman clothed with the sun who cares for the offspring of Jesus (cf. Rev 12:17). And Francis concludes: "Just as the mother makes of the Church a family, so the woman makes of us a people".

Francis underscored the role of women, essential to the history of salvation, and therefore essential for the Church and the world. Yet, he exclaimed, "how many women do not receive the dignity due to them!".

For this reason the Church, the world and even theology need his wit and his style. And as for Mariology, which "can contribute to bring to culture, also through art and poetry, the beauty that humanizes and instills hope", it is also "called to seek more dignified spaces for women in the Church, starting from the common baptismal dignity".