“Hypocrisy can infiltrate anywhere, even in our way of loving”. Pope Francis raised this alarm at today’s general audience catechesis during which, speaking off the cuff, he exhorted a crowd of 12,000 faithful to make sure that “our love is not a soap opera”, but a “strong and sincere love”. “We know well that the greatest commandment that the Lord Jesus gave us is to love: to love God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind, and to love our neighbours as ourselves”, the Pontiff began, recalling that “we are called to love, to charity: this is our highest vocation, our vocation par excellence, to which the joy of Christian hope is also linked”. “He who loves has the joy of hope, of finally meeting the Lord”, the Pope exclaimed. Referring to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he added: “there is a risk that our charity may be hypocritical, that our love may be hypocritical. So we must ask ourselves: when does this hypocrisy happen? How can we make sure that our love is authentic, that our charity is authentic, that we are not pretending to be charitable, and that our love is not a soap opera, but rather a strong, sincere love…?”. “This happens when our love is self-interested, driven by personal interests”, Pope Francis explained, adding off the cuff: “How much self-interested love there is!”. “When our charitable services, to which it seems we are committed, are performed to display ourselves, or for our own satisfaction – ‘how good I am!’ –, this is hypocrisy! Or when we do things that have visibility to make a show of our intelligence or our skills”, the Pope continued, explaining that “behind all this there is a false, deceptive idea: that is, if we love, it is because we are good; as if charity were a creation of man, a product of our heart”.