The Pope's Intentions are set up a year ahead. By the end of March we should have a Pope who can then take ownership of these prayers.
March 2013
Pope's Intentions
Respect for Nature
That respect for nature may grow with the awareness that all creation is God's work entrusted to human responsibility.
Clergy
That bishops, priests, and deacons may be tireless messengers of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
"Do you want to be well?"
«This pool... represents the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, so worthy of our love, and the water that stirred this pool is the blessed blood of the well-beloved Son of God, both God and man, who has washed us all in his precious blood and who, for love's sake, desires to wash everyone who comes simply to him (1Pt 1,19; Rv 7,14)... The sick can be said to symbolize people given to pride, anger, hatred, avarice, luxury: which gives us to understand that all sick people of this kind, able to wash themselves in the blood of Christ, will be completely healed if only they want to go down into this water.. The five porticoes of this pool represent, in a certain sense, our Lord's five sacred wounds, through which and in which we have all been saved...
Beneath the pool's porticoes stood a great number of sick people and whoever went down at once into the pool after the stirring of the water was completely healed. What does this stirring and this touch mean, then, if not that the Holy Spirit descends from on high into us and comes to touch the person within and there provoke a great stirring to the extent that the person's inner self is truly turned around and completely changed? No longer does he enjoy the things that formerly gave him pleasure and what used to repulse him is now his delight. Insult, exterior and interior poverty, renunciation, the interior life, humility, detachment from all created things: these are the things that now make up his greatest happiness. When this touch happens, the sick person – that is to say the outward self – goes down altogether to the bottom of the pool and washes in Christ, in his most precious blood and, by virtue of this touch, is most certainly healed as, besides, it is also written: “All who touched him were healed” (Mt 14,36).