Cardinal Domenico Battaglia, Archbishop of Naples.
by Mimmo Battaglia
Archbishop of Naples
Tonight I can write to you a letter that consoles me and sit: I could write to you, knowing that you do well, to remind you that the beginning of Lent is commitment to fasting, alms, prayer.
Perhaps you too would have reassured and consoled it: it makes us good to know that you have stitches in the existence which, like the earth under our feet, makes us falter.
And instead forgive me, sisters and brothers, but tonight, praying, I feel strong the need to bother me, not to give me any consolation, e I ask you for forgiveness if this will bother you and do not will consolebut I feel that being a father and pastor now more than ever calls me not to stay still, but to hear the earthquake that everyone lives inside.
What is the use of, now, to invite us to fasting, considering that we are all very capable of diets? That fasting slims us, yet it does not contribute to beauty.
And what is it for reminding you of the Elemosine, if so many of us disappear already to the poor man who meet on the street, so that that coin can make us feel good?
And the prayer? Should I tell you to repeat eases, to recite formulas and to put us in place with good practices like the virtuous but sad rich young man?
I would like, tonight, to share my fasting, my alms, my prayer with you: I want to tell you that I am fragile, that I am afraid for the fate of the world, and that I care about the thought of not being able to protect you, in many ways, all. And that I learn, still day after day, that love is to make bread, do not make themselves first.
As I pray I hear Pope Francis’ breath: his breath that is struggling is a powerful icon of his illness-pre-department.
And no, I don’t mean that the disease is prayer to pull on the old consolation that if we suffer, we expand the faults and earn paradise.
No. I mean that the disease is prayer when he reminds us who we are. It is used to tell us that we are all fragile. And that this fragility is what binds us, which makes us human because they are able to recognize us
All children, and therefore brothers and sisters.
Yet, incredibly, the terror of this fragility separates us: the fear of recognizing it -in us or in those who love -, the fear of being weak and not powerful in the eyes of others, makes us perform actions that go towards a totem, ancient yet still present, the most pervasive idolatry: ours
make us God.
We do God every time we don’t know how to recognize we are wrong.
We do God every time that to feel strong, we climb a pedestal made of the rubble of others.
We do God many times, but not in the sacred sense of recognizing his children, but in the sense of being able to crush someone or something in the name of a power that we exchange for happiness, which we exchange for beauty.
My sisters, my brothers, tonight this letter of Lent I write to you to pray with you: they may take these 40 days to take us to the desert where he will speak to our heart.
That he shows us beauty and happiness that resist painbut not in the sense that he gave him as if we asked him for a magic wand: that they resist in the sense that Jesus taught us, that is, that they transfigure him, that passing through it, Easter.
Where are you, Lord, while we fell ill, are we afraid, do we lose?
We have always sought him in strength, in the victory, in the magic of a desire – that we call
Prayer – that is fulfilled. And Jesus, on the other hand, has arrived and comes as a revolutionary, to escape our image of a winning God.
Our Lord is weak: I don’t win. He is fragile: he cries, dies. He is poor: he is betrayed, insulted, slandered, condemned without justice. It is, today as then, the Gospel is scandalous.
Scandalous as a sick Pope, like us when we discover ourselves fragile and far from the perfect image that we would like and then we hear the scandal of a God who is not our image e
similarity.
That we can fast from the presumption of saying to him what he has to do.
That we can experience alms as a search for the good of the other as a bonded double thread to our good.
That we can experience prayer as a sweet silence that does not judge but gets used to.
Where are you, Lord, while we fell ill, are we afraid, do we lose?
In you who suffering you are no longer blind but see, in your brother and your sister who take care of you and also in your brother and sister who does not care about you: because the desert is the place where we learn that Love is not taken but made.
And it will be Easter.
Resurrection, already now.“
† Don Mimmo
