A month ago, we Catholics were living with a heavy heart: information about the Pope Francis' health were not very encouraging and, even today, any communication from the Gemelli Polyclinic, or from any other body regarding the Pontiff's health, is received with a certain knot in the stomach.
These have been complicated weeks, even tense at times, in which Catholics have once again come face to face with human weakness, with lurking death, with the clearest proof of our creatureliness and the impossibility of being in total control of our existence.
Few things are as terribly sobering as walking the path of humility that is illness.
In a world that considers itself self-sufficient and aseptic, we have once again gone through, together with an ailing Pontiff, some "moments of trial" in which although "our physique is weak, but, even so, nothing can prevent us from loving, praying, giving ourselves, being for one another, in faith, luminous signs of hope." (Pope Francis, Angelus, 16-III-2025).
"We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot suppress it. Precisely when men, trying to avoid all suffering, try to distance themselves from everything that could mean affliction, when they want to spare themselves the fatigue and pain of truth, love and goodness, they fall into an empty life in which perhaps there is no more pain, but in which the dark sensation of meaninglessness and loneliness is even greater. What heals man is not dodging suffering and fleeing in the face of pain, but the ability to accept tribulation, to mature in it and find meaning in it through union with Christ, who has suffered with infinite love."In a Jubilee context marked by hope, it is worth recalling these words of Benedict XVI in Spe Salvi.
In these days of passion and death, Christ also asks for us. The question God asks man is not whether he wants to suffer or not, whether he will feel weak, abandoned, alone..., but whether all this, which one day will be part of our life, we want to live together with Him or alone.
To walk with God towards Calvary, as a Cyrenean, helping a little the defeated God in the eyes of men; like the holy women, from afar, without getting too close; like the apostles, ashamed and already asking God's forgiveness for the littleness of our heart; or like the Mother, supported by a John who passes almost unnoticed, but reaching the foot of the cross.
