(A reflection on Pope Leo XIV’s phrase: “To make Christ’s love visible”)
“To make Christ’s love visible” is a simple phrase Pope Leo XIV uses in his letter for World Mission Day. He uses it to describe the mission we all share as members of Christ’s Body, the Church. I would like to sketch what this means in light of the Mystery of Christ’s Transfiguration.
The three disciples invited by the Lord to accompany him to the mountaintop were astonished and afraid when he was transfigured in their sight: his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light (Mt 17, 2). They had no idea what bright depths of glory lay just beneath the surface of his ordinary human flesh: in him there was in him no stately bearing (Is 53,2).
What they glimpsed in this moment was the glory of his divinity visibly shining through his human soul and body. What is this glory? How shall we name it? It is the love of God made visible in the person of the WORD made flesh. For God is love (1 Jn 4,8). And we have seen his glory (Jn 1,14).
In Christ this love, this glory, moves him through the course of his earthly mission. It shines through his every gesture and word. For graciousness is poured upon his lips (Ps 45,2). He shows it in his unflinching witness to the honor of God the Father, in his healings and preaching, his compassion and mercy, his patient endurance, his love of justice, his selflessness, and ultimately in his wounded flesh on the Cross. In all of these things he shows the different ways of his love, the different manifestations of his glory translated into human ways.
He shows his glory, from Tabor to Calvary, to the mount of the Ascension, so that we might take it into ourselves, so that what lies beneath the ordinariness of his flesh might dwell within the ordinariness of our lives. This is why he comes. By the life of grace given to us by Christ through faith and the participations granted through the Sacraments, we begin to share his glory. For, as St Paul says, the love of God has been poured into our hearts (Rom 5,5).
“But, Father, I’m not trained to be a missionary!” I hear this occasionally from committed Catholics who feel ill-equipped to be evangelizers. If we remember that the mission starts with “making Christ’s love visible” in the world, then we realize that we are all better equipped than we might think. From his fullness we have all received (Jn 1,16). For Christ Jesus has given us a share by baptism, confirmation and the Holy Eucharist in what Peter, James, and John glimpsed at the Transfiguration, and in what John and the Blessed Virgin drank-in at the foot of the Cross. And like the first disciples after Pentecost’s gift of the Holy Spirit, we can consciously cultivate this gift, fan it into flame, so that our everyday gestures of compassion, generosity, justice and mercy might break through and make Christ’s love, his glory, visible in the world.
Simply and consciously to bear witness to Christ’s freedom from the resentments of the age, the anger and selfishness that were evident in his time and are evident in ours, is a rather radical way of “making Christ’s love visible”. The charity of Christ urges us (2 Cor 5,14). Simply to defend the poor and outcast as Jesus did, both in word and deed, is an evangelizing sign. And those who have eyes by Christ prepared, will see something of his glory there. To visit the sick, befriend the friendless, embrace the leper (as St Francis did) are all within our graced abilities to do.
To make the sign of the Cross before the plane takes off,
To joyfully avoid a useless argument,
To make the extra effort to help someone without transportation get to Mass,
to take food to an elderly neighbor, or to one whose husband or son was just deported, (without worrying about what others may think),
to resist the temptation to vilify the downtrodden,
All these things, and so many others, are from the Lord, and make Christ’s love visible; they share in the charity that is his glory. And by the grace of his life in us these things advance the Kingdom he died and rose to inaugurate.
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1 March 2026
Words and Things 