Vatican City, 18 April 2014 (VIS) –
At 9.15 p.m. this evening, Good Friday, the Bishop of Rome presided
at the Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, service at the Colosseum,
where thousands of faithful accompanied Christ's path to the Cross by
the light of candles and torches. From the Palatine Hill the Holy
Father listened to the reflections that accompanied each of the
fourteen stations, dedicated this year to the economic crisis that
afflicts many countries, to immigration, poverty, and the situation
of women and the marginalised in today's world. The cross was carried
to the various stations by a worker and a businessman, two
immigrants, two homeless people, two detainees, two former drug
addicts, two patients, two children, a family, two elderly people,
two nuns, the Custodians of the Holy Land and, in the first and last
stations, the Cardinal Archbishop of Rome, Agostino Vallini.
At the end the Pope addressed some
unscripted remarks to the participants, affirming that “God placed
on Jesus' Cross all the weight of our sins, all the injustice
perpetrated by every Cain against his brother, all the bitterness of
the betrayals of Judas and Peter, all the vanity of tyrants, all the
arrogance of false friends. It was a heavy Cross, like the night of
abandoned people, as heavy as the death of loved ones, heavy because
it carried all the ugliness of evil. However it is also a glorious
Cross, like the dawn after a long night, as it represents all of
God's love, which is greater than our iniquity and our betrayals. In
the Cross we see the monstrosity of man, when we allow ourselves to
be guided by evil; but we also see the immensity of God's mercy; He
does not treat us according to our sins, but according to His mercy”.
He continued, “Before the Cross of
Christ, we see, we can almost touch with our hands how much we are
eternally loved; before the Cross, we feel like 'children' and not
'things ' or objects, as St. Gregory of Nazianzus affirmed when he
turned to Christ with this prayer: 'If it were not for you, O my
Christ, I would feel as a finished creature. … O, our Jesus, guide
us from the Cross to the Resurrection and teach us that evil will not
have the last word, but rather love, mercy, and forgiveness. O
Christ, teach us to exclaim anew, “Yesterday I was crucified with
Christ; today I am glorified with Him”'.
“And in the end, all together, let us
recall the sick, let us think of all those people abandoned beneath
the weight of the Cross, so that they might find in the trial of the
Cross the strength of hope, of the hope of the Resurrection and the
love of God”.
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