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The Pope in St. Peter’s Square at Mass for the deceased cardinals and bishops – Vatican Media
“We gratefully recall the testimony of deceased cardinals and bishops who lived in fidelity to the divine will; we pray for them trying to follow their example.” And “the Lord always pours out his Spirit of wisdom upon us, especially in this time of trial. Above all, in the hours when the road becomes more difficult, it does not abandon us, it stays with us“.
HERE THE TEXT OF THE HOMILY
This is what Pope Francis said in the homily of the Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica for the cardinals and bishops who died during the year.
Six cardinals disappeared during the year (Prosper Grech, Renato Corti, Zenon Grocholewski, Adrianus Johannes Simonis, Marian Jaworski, Anthony Soter Fernandez), 163 archbishops and bishops from around the world.
Commenting on the pages of the Gospel, the Pope explained that “the revelation of Jesus today challenges us all: we are called to Believing in the resurrection not as a kind of mirage on the horizon, but as an event already present., which mysteriously involves us already now. And yet this same faith in the resurrection does not ignore or mask the bewilderment we humanly experience in the face of death. “
“Today, therefore, it is to us that the Lord repeats: ‘I am the resurrection and the life,” he continued. And he calls us to renew the great leap of faith, entering from now on the light of the Resurrection ”. “When this leap occurs, our way of thinking and seeing things changes”, and “every event is then evaluated in the light of another dimension, that of eternity.” “As we pray today for the cardinals and bishops who have passed away in the last year,” the Pontiff continued, “we ask the Lord to help us correctly consider his existential parable. We ask him to dissolve that negative sadness, which sometimes infiltrates us, as if everything ends with death. It is a feeling far from faith, which adds to the human fear of having to die, and from which no one can be said to be completely immune ”.
Therefore, “faced with the enigma of death, even the believer must continually convert. Every day we are called to go beyond our instinctive image of death as the total annihilation of a person“.
“May the prayer for our deceased brothers be truly Christian”, exhorted Francis, hoping “to have a truly realistic vision of their existence: to understand the meaning and value of the good they have done, of their strength, of their commitment and love given in a selfless way; to understand that what it means to live aspiring not to an earthly homeland, but to a better one, that is, the heavenly“.
“Prayer in suffrage for the dead,” he added, “raised in the confidence that they live in God, thus spreads its benefits also on us, pilgrims here on earth. It educates us for a true vision of life, it reveals the meaning to us. .. of the tribulations that must be passed through to enter the Kingdom of God, opens us to true freedom, disposing us to the continuous search for eternal goods “.
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