VATICAN CITY. Pope Francis returned to denounce the “monstrosity” of the war in Ukraine and to appeal for “a stop to this savage cruelty”, at the Wednesday general audience, greeting a group of Ukrainian children who arrived in Rome and were present in the Paul VI Hall.
The Argentine Pontiff addressed “a particularly affectionate greeting” to the Ukrainian children hosted by the “Help them to live” Foundation, the “Puer” Association and the Ukrainian Embassy to the Holy See. The faithful present at the audience underlined this passage with a long applause. “With this greeting to the children – added the Argentine Pontiff – let’s go back to thinking about this monstrosity of war and renew our prayers so that this savage cruelty that is war is stopped”. At the end of the audience, the group of children, accompanied by some parents, greeted the Pope. A child gave Francis three drawings depicting a dove of peace, a heart with the yellow and light blue colors of the Ukrainian flag, and an inscription , always with these two colors, «children for peace». Jorge Mario Bergoglio then wanted to pose for a photo with the group.
The Pope also mentioned his trip to Malta next weekend, framing it in the theme of migrants arriving in Europe. «Next Saturday and Sunday I will go to Malta», he said, «in that luminous land I will be a pilgrim in the footsteps of the apostle Paul, who was welcomed there with great humanity after having been shipwrecked at sea while on his way to Rome. This apostolic journey will thus be an opportunity to go to the sources of the proclamation of the Gospel, to meet personally a Christian community with a thousand-year and lively history, to meet the inhabitants of a country located in the center of the Mediterranean and in the south of the continent. European, today – underlined Bergoglio – even more committed to welcoming many brothers and sisters in search of refuge ».
Francis continued a cycle of catechesis dedicated to old age, focusing today on the figures of Anna and Simeon, the two elders who, according to the Gospel of Luke, recognize the baby Jesus as the Messiah even without knowing him. This is the starting point, for the Pope, to underline that “old age weakens, in one way or another, the sensitivity of the body: one more blind, one more deaf … God will not lose his passage: on the contrary, he will also be more ready to accept it, he will have more sensitivity to welcome the Lord when the Lord passes: let us remember – the Pope said – that a Christian attitude is to be attentive to the visits of the Lord, who passes in our life with inspiration, with the invitation to be better. St. Augustine used to say: “I am afraid of God when he passes” – “But why are you afraid?” – “Yes, I’m afraid I won’t notice it and let it pass”. It is the Holy Spirit who prepares the senses to understand when the Lord is visiting us, as he did with Simeon and Anna. Today we need this more than ever: an old age endowed with lively spiritual senses and capable of recognizing the signs of God, indeed, the Sign of God, which is Jesus ».
Hence the Pope’s warning: “The anesthesia of the spiritual senses, in the excitement and numbness of those of the body, is a widespread syndrome in a society that cultivates the illusion of eternal youth, and its most dangerous is that it is mostly unconscious. You don’t realize you are anesthetized ». Spiritual sensitivity, however, “is not simply about thinking about God or about religion.” But “compassion and pity, shame and remorse, fidelity and dedication, tenderness and honor, one’s own responsibility and pain for the other. It’s curious: numbness doesn’t make you understand compassion, it doesn’t make you understand pity, it doesn’t make you feel shame or remorse for doing a bad thing. And old age becomes, so to speak, the first victim of this loss of sensitivity. In a society that mainly exercises sensitivity towards enjoyment, attention to the fragile can only fail and the competition of the winners can prevail. Of course – continued Francis – the rhetoric of inclusion is the ritual formula of any politically correct discourse. But it still does not bring about a real correction in the practices of normal coexistence: a culture of social tenderness is struggling to grow. The spirit of human fraternity – which it seemed necessary to revive strongly – is like a discarded garment, to be admired, yes, but… in a museum ».
At the end of the audience, among other things, the Pope praised the public water: the water, he told the National Association for the reclamation of irrigation present in the Paul VI Hall, is an “invaluable patrimony”.