In his message before the Angelus, the pope reflected on the day's Gospel reading. In the passage from Luke, a group of Sadducees question Jesus about whose wife a woman will be after death if she was married, consecutively, to seven brothers, bearing no children by them.
But "Jesus does not fall into the trap," Francis said. Jesus explains to the Sadducees that "those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise."
With this answer, Jesus invites us to think about how the earthly dimension we live in now is not the only dimension, the pope said. "There is another, no longer subject to death, in which it will be fully manifested that we are children of God."
"It gives great consolation and hope to hear this simple and clear word of Jesus about life beyond death; we need it so much especially in our time, so rich in knowledge of the universe but so poor in wisdom about eternal life," he added. "Life belongs to God, who loves us and cares so much about us."
"May the Virgin Mary help us to live every day in the perspective of what we affirm in the final part of the Creed: 'I await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,'" he concluded.
After the Angelus, Pope Francis noted the Nov. 9 beatification of Maria Emilia Riquelme y Zayas in Granada, Spain.
She was the founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and of Mary Immaculate, he said, adding that she "was exemplary in the fervor of Eucharistic adoration and generous in service to the most needy."
He asked for a round of applause for the new blessed and for St. Bartholomew Fernandes of Braga, who was canonized in July through an "equivalent canonization," also sometimes called "equipollent" or "confirmation of cultus," which is when a pope chooses to waive the usual requirement of a miracle for canonization, because of the holy person's established life of virtue and their long-standing veneration as a saint.
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.