Jesus is the Risen Shepherd who takes upon his shoulders “our brothers and sisters crushed by evil in all its varied forms”, Pope Francis has said.
With tens of thousands of people gathered in St Peter’s Square, the Pope urged Christians to be instruments of Christ’s outreach to refugees and migrants, victims of war and exploitation, famine and loneliness.
For the 30th year in a row, Dutch farmers and florists blanketed the area around the altar with grass and 35,000 flowers and plants: lilies, roses, tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, birch and linden.
Preaching without a prepared text, Francis began by imagining the disciples desolate because “the one they loved so much was executed. He died.”
While they are huddling in fear, the angel tells them: “He is risen.” And, the Pope said, the Church continues to proclaim that message always and everywhere, including to those whose lives are truly, unfairly difficult.
“It is the mystery of the cornerstone that was discarded, but has become the foundation of our existence,” he said. And those who follow Jesus, “we pebbles”, find meaning even amid suffering because of sure hope in the Resurrection. Pope Francis suggested everyone find a quiet place on Easter to reflect on their problems and the problems of the world and then tell God: “I don’t know how this will end, but I know Christ has risen.”
After celebrating Easter Mass, Pope Francis gave his blessing urbi et orbi, to the city of Rome and the world. Before reciting the blessing, he told the crowd that “in every age the Risen Shepherd tirelessly seeks us, his brothers and sisters, wandering in the deserts of this world. With the marks of the Passion – the wounds of his merciful love – he draws us to follow him on his way.”
Break down the walls of sterile pessimism, says Pontiff
The Resurrection was a “transforming force” to a humanity broken by greed and war, Pope Francis said at the Easter Vigil.The Vigil began with the lighting of the fire and Easter candle in the atrium of St Peter’s basilica. Walking behind the Easter candle and carrying a candle of his own, Pope Francis entered the basilica in darkness.
In his homily the Pope recalled the women who went “with uncertain and weary steps” to Christ’s tomb. He said the faces of those women, full of despair, reflected the faces of mothers, grandmothers, children and young people who carry the “burden of injustice and brutality.”
The poor and the exploited, the lonely and the abandoned, and “immigrants deprived of country, house and family” suffer the heartbreak of the women who had seen “human dignity crucified”, he said.
However, the Pope added, in the silence of death, Jesus’s heartbeat resounds and his Resurrection comes as a gift. “In the Resurrection, Christ rolled back the stone of the tomb, but he wants also to break down all the walls that keep us locked in our sterile pessimism, in our ... ivory towers that isolate us from life.”
Francis washes feet of inmates
Pope Francis washed the feet of 12 inmates at Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper last week.The inmates, at a prison in Paliano for men and women who testified against associates or accomplices, included three women and a man converting from Islam to Catholicism. In Jesus’s time, washing the feet of one’s guests was performed by slaves, the Pope said. Jesus “reverses” this role in order to “sow love among us”, he said.
