Vatican City, 28 September 2014 (VIS) –
Today in St. Peter's Square a meeting was held to celebrate old age,
organised by the Pontifical Council for the Family, entitled “The
blessing of long life”. The meeting, which brought together
thousands of elderly and grandparents accompanied by their relatives
from all over the world, began at 8.30 a.m. with a “tour of old age
through five Biblical episodes”. An hour later, the Holy Father
arrived in the Square to join the elderly, with whom he had spoken
before Mass at 10.30 a.m. The Pope emeritus Benedict XVI was
personally invited by Pope Francis and participated in the meeting.
The Pope explained that the first
reading “echoes in various ways the Fourth Commandment: 'Honour
your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the
land that the Lord your God is giving you'. A people has no future
without such an encounter between generations, without children being
able to accept with gratitude the witness of life from the hands of
their parents. And part of this gratitude for those who gave you life
is also gratitude for our heavenly Father. There are times when
generations of young people, for complex historical and cultural
reasons, feel a deeper need to be independent from their parents,
'breaking free', as it were, from the legacy of the older generation.
It is a kind of adolescent rebellion. But unless the encounter, the
meeting of generations, is re-established, unless a new and fruitful
intergenerational equilibrium is restored, what results is a serious
impoverishment for all, and the freedom which prevails in society is
actually a false freedom, which almost always becomes a form of
authoritarianism”.
Francis emphasised that “Jesus did
not abolish the law of the family and the passing of generations, but
brought it to fulfilment. The Lord formed a new family, in which
bonds of kinship are less important than our relationship with him
and our doing the will of God the Father. Yet the love of Jesus and
the Father completes and fulfils our love of parents, brothers and
sisters, and grandparents; it renews family relationships with the
lymph of the Gospel and of the Holy Spirit”. He remarked that Mary,
when she visited her relatives Elizabeth and Zechariah, “was able
to listen to those elderly and amazed parents; she treasured their
wisdom, and it proved precious for her in her journey as a woman, as
a wife and as a mother”, and added, “the Virgin Mary likewise
shows us the way: the way of encounter between the young and the
elderly. The future of a people necessarily supposes this encounter:
the young give the strength which enable a people to move forward,
while the elderly consolidate this strength by their memory and their
traditional wisdom”.
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