“Very often when we are pushed to the limit we are no longer able to trust in the Lord: this is an awful temptation”. Pope Francis said this in today’s general audience catechesis, in which he focused on the figure of a “great heroine of the people”: Judith, who is able to confront and kill General Holofernes, the leader of Nebuchadnezzar’s army, which is “sowing death and destruction and has reached the Promised Land, threatening the very lives of the sons and daughters of Israel”, as narrated in the biblical Book of Judith. “The situation takes a dramatic turn to the point that the inhabitants of the city turn to the elders, asking them to surrender to the enemy”, Pope Francis recalled. “Their words are words of despair: ‘There is no help for us now! Instead, God has sold us into their power by laying us prostrate before them in thirst and utter exhaustion’”. “They go so far as to say this!”, the Pope said, speaking off the cuff: “God has sold us, the despair of this people is great”. “The end seems inevitable, they have lost the capacity to trust in God”, the Pope continued. “Paradoxically, it now seems that to escape death the only option is to surrender into the hands of the killer”. And the besiegers “know it”, Pope Francis added off the cuff: “Looting the city, taking women as slaves and then killing all the others – that is truly the limit”.