The semi-deserted churchyard of San Pietro with a small, wonderful representation of children. A great light in the pandemic darkness.
The churchyard of San Pietro, Good Friday year 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic still dictates its conditions. The people present are few, rigorously remotely and with masks rigorously to cover noses and mouths. Few people but among them there is a small and extraordinary representation of a wonderful community: that of children. Let's imagine the displeasure of Pope Francis in observing the splendid churchyard of San Pietro deprived of its natural vital energy: the faithful.
But if in these eight years of pontificate we have learned to know this Pope a little, we imagine, in the same way, his infinite joy in observing that a small community of children illuminated the community of faithful present for the celebration of the Via Crucis. A small community representing a people, that of children, which the pandemic is subjecting to an unimaginable effort, difficult to sustain and with unpredictable consequences.
The words of the children, the thoughts of Francis
The Via Crucis begins, the narration of the last part of Jesus' life begins and the story of the children begins, of their daily Via Crucis in the year of the pandemic. The stations follow one another, states of mind follow one another that slowly lead to the darkness of the human soul, represented by a cross and by the man who, to that cross, is nailed. Children tell their stories, made up of good deeds and selfless thoughts and if, at times, they have been a little selfish, they have understood the mistake and immediately corrected that mistake.
Those thoughts, those voices, those drawings, follow a precise plot, clearly delineated. Being Christian means be one with the other, meet him, hold out your hand, smile at him, enter into communion with him. Those thoughts, those voices, those drawings seem a theoretical distillation of Pope Francis' pontificate. That choice to take the name of the Saint of Assisi for his pontificate is the first, very strong sign of change. The Church was born poor, must remain poor and everything he possesses must be at the disposal of the least, the marginalized, those who have no voice.
Francis, the Pope seen as a taste
This very clear papal thought, so contrary to the Catholic tradition, has made Pope Francis appear, to the conservative part of the ecclesiastical hierarchies and the media, a taste, Che Guevara with residence in the Vatican. With Che Guevara Pope Francis has in common the country of origin, the great and splendid Argentina, and, above all, an innate idiosyncrasy towards a power that he prefers the few to the detriment of the many. SeChe Guevara was a personality uncomfortable, Pope Francis is an uncomfortable Pope. Very uncomfortable.
To those children, to those innocent faces, who have a whole life to live, Pope Francis wants to teach above all one thing: never accept abuses, never remain passive when someone, through deplorable actions or using shameful words, hurts, mortifies. , humiliates people, especially the weakest and most defenseless. Pope Francis is sowing seeds to be able to see the sprouts of a New, Human Church, Christian, that is, a Church that is truly the image of Christ on the ground.
The path is harsh, difficult, full of traps. And those traps are scattered everywhere. Many do not love Pope Francis. They don't love his thoughts, they don't love hers revolutionary openings, do not like that wind of taste change that entered the Vatican together with him on March 13, 2013. If Pope Francis is so much appreciated even by lay people, agnostics or non-believers, it is because he wants to bring the Church out of the moral darkness in which it has sunk, through a true, authentic return to origins.
A return that sees again at the center of the whole MAN, Every Single Man.
