The Resurrection is a call to revive our faith, Pope Francis said in his Easter homily. “To celebrate Easter is to believe once more that God constantly breaks into our personal histories, challenging our conventions, those fixed ways of thinking and acting that end up paralysing us,” he said. The Easter Vigil Mass, held on a very rainy night, began in the atrium of St Peter’s Basilica with the blessing of the fire and of the Easter candle. With most of the lights in the basilica turned off, Pope Francis and the concelebrating cardinals, bishops and priests proceeded toward the altar, stopping first to light the Pope’s candle and then those of the concelebrants and faithful. “We began this celebration outside, plunged in the darkness of the night and the cold,” the Pope said. “We felt an oppressive silence at the death of the Lord, a silence with which each of us can identify, a silence that penetrates to the depths of the heart of every disciple, who stands wordless before the Cross.” But, the Pope said, Jesus’s empty tomb should fill Christians with trust in God and should assure them that God’s light “can shine in the least expected and most hidden corners of our lives”. Before giving his formal Easter blessing Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) in St Peter’s Square, the Pope prayed that Easter would bring “fruits of reconciliation”, hope, dial­ogue, peace, consolation, new life and wisdom. He made special mention of the “carnage” in Syria and recent violence along Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, which Francis said had not spared “the defenceless”.