Meeting a mother mourning a newborn baby and visiting young women rescued from forced prostitution are moments from the Year of Mercy that remain impressed on Pope Francis’s heart.
The Pope reviewed the Holy Year in a 40-minute interview aired last Sunday on TV2000, a television station owned by the Italian bishops’ conference.
Describing a visit to the neonatal ward of Rome’s San Giovanni Hospital in September, he said: “There was a woman who cried and cried and cried standing by her two infants – tiny, but beautiful.
The third had died. She cried for that dead child while she caressed the other two.”
“I thought of the practice of getting rid of babies before they are born – this horrible crime. They get rid of them because ‘it’s better that way’, because it is easier, ‘it is a big responsibility’. That is a serious sin.”
He said: “This woman had three children and wept for the one who died; she was unable to console herself with the two remaining.”
The Pope also visited a community of 15 young women who had been rescued from traffickers who had forced them into prostitution.
One African woman told the Pope that her traffickers had beaten and tortured her, even when she was pregnant. In a previous pregnancy, they still made her work the streets.
“She told me, ‘Father, I gave birth on the street in winter. Alone. All alone. My daughter died,’ ” the Pope said. He said that God used the Year of Mercy to plant seeds.
“I believe the Lord will grow good, simple, daily things into the life of the people – nothing spectacular.”
Pontiff: a door closes, but the heart of Christ stays open
Following Christ the King, whose regal power is love and mercy, means the whole Church and each Christian must “follow his way of tangible love”, Pope Francis has said.Celebrating the feast of Christ the King last Sunday and officially closing the Extraordinary Jubilee celebration of the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis said: “We have received mercy in order to be merciful.”
St Peter’s Square was filled with 70,000 people for the Mass, which was concelebrated by the cardinals Pope Francis had created the previous day.
The Pope and the new cardinals gave thanks at the atrium of St Peter’s Basilica for “the gifts of grace received” during the Holy Year. Pope Francis then went to the threshold of the Holy Door and pulled each side shut. The door will be sealed until the next Holy Year, which is likely to be in 2025.
Even if the Holy Door is closed, Pope Francis said, “the true door of mercy, which is the heart of Christ, always remains open wide for us”.
The power of Christ the King, he said, “is not power as defined by this world, but the love of God, a love capable of encountering and healing all things”.
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Pope Francis has urged 17 new cardinals to resist “the virus of polarisation and animosity” so that such attitudes do not “find a place in our hearts”.With people we consider our enemies, the Pope said, “our first reaction ... is to dismiss them. Often we try to demonise them, so we have a ‘sacred’ justification for dismissing them.” But in God, he said, there are no enemies, only brothers and sisters to love.
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