At his public audience on Wednesday, May 4, Pope Francis told elderly people to “ please look at the young people: they are watching us.”

Continuing his series of talks on old age, the Pope cited the example set be Eleazar, who refused even to pretend to eat the meat demanded by the king. By that refusal, he said, Eleazar defended “the honor of faith” against the temptation to “religious hypocrisy.”

The Pope warned against the “gnostic temptation,” which he defined as a tendency to see faith as “a spirituality, not a practice, a strength of the mind, not a form of life.”