Alberto Chiara at the hearing by Francesco with his wife Marina.
“The case is the pseudonym of God when he does not sign personally.” For Alberto Chiara, on the day of the death of Pope Francis, these words of Anatole France that Carlo Carretto loved to mention have something that of revelation. Journalist and writer, already editor -in -chief to Famiglia Cristiana where he was the coordinator of the Desk Chiesa, observer at the Synod assemblies, Chiara still recalls the first official speech by Francesco in Rio de Janeiro. It was 2013, and the Pontiff invited to reread the passage of the Gospel of Luca in which we speak of Emmaus, the village a few kilometers from Jerusalem where Christ appeared to two disciples after death on the cross. That episode, he said, could help us become a key to reading the present. To remember him, the Franciscans of the Holy Land custody go to Pilgrimage to Emmaus, which has now become the village of El-Quubeiboh. They do it on Easter Monday: the same day on which the Church remains up to the disappearance of Francesco. A case? Perhaps, or maybe it’s the closure of a circle. Who lets the same signature glimpsed by France.
What feelings did you feel in learning the news of the Pope’s death?
«Many and tumultuous. He loved to repeat: “What we are experiencing is not simply an era of changes, but it is a change in the era”. Here: perhaps the only deep interpreter of the times we live goes, read by him in all their folds and faced by helping everyone not to despair, indeed ».
What memory did it immediately come to her mind?
“A speech by Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Rio de Janeiro during the World Youth Day 2013”.
Which of the many pronouncements?
“The one made to the Brazilian bishops on Saturday, 27 July 2013. It was almost a programmatic discourse.”
What did he hit her?
«The icon of Emmaus that the Pope suggested as a key to reading the present and the future. “First of all, we must not give in to fear – said Francesco – to disenchantment, discouragement, complaints. We have worked a lot and, sometimes, we seem to be defeated”. The Holy Father invited to reread in this light, once again, the episode of Emmaus. “The two disciples – he remembered – run away from Jerusalem. They move away from the ‘nudity’ of God. They are scandalized by the failure of the Messiah in which they had hoped and who now appears irreparably defeated, humiliated, even after the third day. The difficult mystery of the people who leave the Church; of people who, after having let themselves be deducted from other proposals, believe that their church – offer more significant and important. An always valid analysis ».
What to do, then?
«Bergoglio started from a still current observation. “Perhaps the Church – he claimed – appeared too weak, perhaps too far from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their anxieties, perhaps too cold towards them, perhaps too self -referential, perhaps prisoner of their rigid languages, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a wreck of the past, insufficient for the new questions; perhaps the Church had answers for the childhood of man but not for his adult age. disciples of Emmaus; not only those who seek answers in the new and widespread religious groups, but also those who seem now without God both in theory and in practice “. What to do, then, she asks me … if Jorge Mario Bergoglio also asked. By answering himself: “We need a Church that is not afraid to enter their night. A Church is needed to meet them in their way. A Church is needed to fit into their conversation. We need a Church that knows how to dialogue with those disciples, who, running away from Jerusalem, wander without a destination, alone, with its own disenchantment, with the disappointment of a Christianity considered sterile, unable to generate, incapable of generating. sense””.
Words that seem to be written today….
«The outgoing church, the hospital church, the continuous reference to the mercy based on listening, dialogue and forgiveness: the pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is already everything in that speech. Which in some way contains an interesting temporal suggestion, linked to these hours ».
Which?
«The Church offers listening to the page of the disciples of Emmaus in the Vespertin Mass of Easter. During Easter Monday, the Franciscans of the Holy Land custody go to Pilgrimage to Emmaus, in the village of El-Quubeiboh, 11 kilometers from Jerusalem ».
A case?
“Carlo Carretto, citing the French writer not particularly religious Anatole France, said that” the case is the pseudonym of God when he does not signs personally “”.
