Pope Francis participated this Sunday morning (2) in the celebration of Palm Sunday in St. Peter’s Square, in the Vatican, and issued a warning on humanity’s indifference towards the millions of “abandoned” people around the world.
The ceremony, which marks the beginning of Holy Week in the Catholic Church and precedes the Easter Triduum, takes place one day after the Pope’s discharge from the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, following treatment for infectious bronchitis.
In front of over 60 thousand faithful, according to estimates by the Vatican gendarmerie, the Pope recalled that for Catholics, “rejected and excluded” people are “living icons of Christ”.
“Today we ask for this grace: knowing how to love Jesus forsaken and knowing how to love Jesus in every abandoned person. We ask for the grace to be able to see and recognize the Lord who continues to cry out in them. of indifference “, he declared in the homily of the mass that he presided over the rite of blessing of the olive branches.
According to the Argentine, “for us, disciples of the ‘Abandoned’, no one can be marginalized, no one can be left alone”. “We have not been left alone by God, let us take care of those who are left alone,” he added.
Jorge Bergoglio also warned that there are “many abandoned ‘Christians'” in the contemporary world and recalled, for example, a homeless German who, a few weeks ago, “died alone in St. Peter’s Square”.
“There are entire peoples exploited and left to themselves; there are poor people who live at the crossroads of our streets and whose eyes we don’t have the courage to look at; migrants, who are no longer faces, but numbers; rejected inmates, people classified as problematic,” he listed.
The leader of the Catholic Church underlined that “many people need our closeness, many abandoned”. “I too need Jesus to caress me, he draws close to me, and for this I go to look for him in the abandoned, in the lonely”.
The Holy Father also warned against “the invisible, the hidden, the abandoned, who are discarded with kid gloves: unborn children, the elderly left alone, who can be the father, the mother, the grandfather and the grandmother abandoned in geriatric homes, the sick not visited, people with disabilities who are ignored, young people who feel a great emptiness inside themselves without anyone really listening to their cry of pain and find no other way out than suicide”.
During the homily, Francis mentioned “the sufferings of Jesus”, recalling that “we are faced with the most excruciating suffering, that of the spirit”.
“We might ask why [Jesus] did it come that far? There is only one answer: for us. He was in solidarity with us to the extreme, to be with us to the end, so that none of us could imagine ourselves alone and hopeless. He lived through abandonment so as not to leave us hostage to desolation and to always remain by our side,” he explained.
Finally, the religious left a message of hope for all people who face “the abyss of abandonment”, underlining that Jesus saves from the “why” of every existence and transforms “hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, capable of mercy, tenderness and compassion”.
«Christ, abandoned, drives us to seek him and to love him in the abandoned. Because in them we not only have the needy, but we have Him, Jesus Forsaken, who saved us by descending into the depths of our human condition, he recalled at the ceremony, which was entrusted to Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, vice dean of the College of Cardinals.
At the end of the Mass, the Pope made a long journey in the popemobile across St. Peter’s Square to greet the faithful. He smiled, blessed everyone and waved the Ukrainian flag to a group of faithful. .
Source: Terra
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