CNS PHOTO | PAUL HARING Pope Francis leaves after celebrating Ash Wednesday Mass in Rome in 2015.

Lent is a time of conversion and a time to deepen one's faith, demonstrating and sharing it through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, Pope Francis said.

"Faith finds expression in concrete everyday actions meant to help our neighbours in body and spirit," the pope said in his message for Lent, which begins Feb. 10 for Latin-rite Catholics.

Feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, welcoming strangers, offering instruction, giving comfort - "on such things will we be judged," the pope wrote in the message.

Particularly during the Year of Mercy, he said, Catholics are called to recognize their own need for God's mercy.

It is also time to see the greatness of God's love seen in the death and resurrection of Christ and one's obligation to assist others by communicating God's love and mercy through words and deeds, he said.

"The root of all sin" is thinking that one is God, something often expressed in a total preoccupation for accumulating money and power, the pope wrote.

Just as individuals can be tempted to think they have no need of God, social and political systems can run the same risk, ignoring both God and the real needs of human beings.

"Love alone is the answer to that yearning for infinite happiness," Pope Francis wrote. It is the only response to the longings "that we think we can satisfy with the idols of knowledge, power and riches.

"The danger always remains that by a constant refusal to open the doors of their hearts to Christ who knocks on them in the poor," he said, "the proud, rich and powerful will end up condemning themselves and plunging into the eternal abyss of solitude which is hell."

But through acts of mercy and charity, "by touching the flesh of the crucified Jesus in the suffering," he wrote, "sinners can receive the gift of realizing that they too are poor and in need."

"In the corporal works of mercy we touch the flesh of Christ in our brothers and sisters who need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, visited," he wrote.

"In the spiritual works of mercy - counsel, instruction, forgiveness, admonishment and prayer - we touch more directly our own sinfulness."