VATICAN CITY – “Today we ask for this grace: to know how to love Jesus forsaken and to know how to love Jesus in every one who is abandoned”. Strong words, with a clear reference to migrants, those pronounced today by Pope Francis in the homily of the Palm Sunday Mass in Vatican. A function that saw the Pope once again the protagonist, after the hospitalization that had worried the faithful from all over the world. 

The Pontiff arrived in St. Peter’s Square packed with faithful (about 60,000) aboard the popemobile, crossing the area between two wings of the crowd. The open car then stopped at the foot of the Obelisk, the Pope got out and started the solemn celebration, blessing the palm trees.

Then the homily, in a slightly hoarse voice: “In the most tragic hour, Jesus experiences abandonment by God. A suffering summed up in the phrase ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’ Christ forsaken moves us to seek and love him in the abandoned”, he added, “because in them there are not only those in need, but he is there, Jesus forsaken, who saved us by descending to the depths of our human condition”.

Thus, the reference to migrants (and not only to them) has become direct: “There are entire peoples who are exploited and left to their own devices; there are poor people who live at the crossroads of our streets and whose eyes we don’t have the courage to meet; migrants who are no longer faces but numbers; rejected prisoners, people classified as problems”, the Pope reiterated, adding that “there are also many invisible, hidden abandoned Christs who are discarded with white gloves: unborn children, the elderly left alone, unvisited sick people, ignored disabled people, young people who feel a great emptiness inside without anyone really listening to their cry of pain”.

“He is Jesus for each one of us. Many need our closeness, many abandoned. I too need Jesus to caress me, to draw close to me, and for this I go to find him in the abandoned, in the lonely”.

A reference, the latter, perhaps also to that embrace of the mother who lost her daughter, a few hours earlier: on Saturday, in fact, as he left the Gemelli Polyclinic, Pope Francis got out of the car and greeted the people present among the such as the parents of a 5-year-old girl who died on Friday night in the same hospital. Pope Francis embraced his mother (in the pic above), who burst into tears, and then addressed the two parents with words of comfort. The father, his voice broken by tears, turned to the Pope saying: “You met her (the little girl) because in 2019 you came to Casal Bertone and held her in your arms”. Before entering the car, the Pontiff prayed together with the two parents and greeted them by embracing and kissing them. The video of the scene went around the world, immediately going viral.

The health conditions of the 86-year-old Francesco had aroused concern after his hospitalization due to breathing difficulties. But even when he was considered out of danger, there were doubts about the date of his return to the Vatican and his possible participation in the rites of Holy Week. Those doubts were allayed on Friday when the Vatican announced that Francis would be stepping down the next day and attending the Church’s most significant week, which commemorates the death and resurrection of Christ recounted in the Gospels. The celebrations will continue until Easter Mass on Sunday 9 April.

As on other occasions and since he is confined to a wheelchair due to knee pain, Francis will only preside over the ceremony on Sunday, seated at the center of the altar. The Pope is nonetheless determined to stick to his work schedule and wanted to show the world that he has recovered. “I’m still alive,” he joked to faithful and journalists as he left the Gemelli hospital on Saturday.

Pics from www.vaticannews.va