Vatican City, 22 March 2015 (VIS) - “It
is not easy to approach a patient. The most beautiful and most
miserable things in life are reserved, they conceal themselves. One
tries to hide the greatest love, out of modesty; and for modesty we
also hide those things that demonstrate our human misery”. With
these words the Pope addressed the patients he met in the Basilica of
Gesù Nuovo yesterday, explaining that to approach a patient it is
necessary to go to him, since the modesty of life leads him to
conceal himself. “When there are lifelong illnesses, when we find
ourselves faced with maladies that affect an entire life, we prefer
to hide them, because going to visit a patient means going and
finding our own sickness. It means having the courage to say to
oneself: I too have a malady of the heart, of the soul, of the
spirit; I too am spiritually afflicted”.
Francis spoke of the mystery of
sickness, explaining that although God created us to change the
world, to be efficient, to dominate Creation, “when we find
ourselves before sickness, we see that the ailment prevents this:
that man or that woman who was born this way, or who became this way,
seems to say 'no' to the mission of transforming the world. … We
are only able to approach the sick … if we accustom ourselves to
looking at the Crucified Christ, as here is the only explanation for
this 'failure', this human failure, this ailment throughout our
lives”.
“If you cannot understand the Lord”,
he said to the patients present, “I ask the Lord to make you
understand in your hearts that you are the flesh of Christ”.
Francis thanked the volunteers who spend their time “caressing
Christ's flesh, serving the crucified and living Christ”, and the
doctors and nurses who have not transformed their profession into a
form of trade, as “when medicine turns into trade, into business,
it is like the priesthood when it acts in the same way: it loses the
kernel of its vocation”. Finally, he urged all the Christians of
the diocese of Naples not to forget what Jesus asked us, and what we
will all be judged upon: “I was sick, and you cared for me”. “The
sick suffer: they are a reflection of the suffering Christ”, he
concluded. “Do not be afraid to draw close to Christ Who suffers”.
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