“The most beautiful memory of Pope Francis is undoubtedly his last day.” That’s the last image that Monsignor Davide Milanipresident of the Foundation Ente Entertainment in Rome and Officiale del Dicastery of culture and education of the Holy See, has of Pope Francis. «On the Easter party, the day that gives meaning to the Christian faith, the day that is the reason why we believe, Pope Francis made A series of gestures that are the index of that book that was his pontificate. First of all, the synthetic figure of his pontificate, beyond many sociological or political reductions that many commentators highlight in these hours, told us about Christ. In his last homily, read by Cardinal Comastri in Easter Mass, Pope Francis reminded us “Here is the greatest hope of our life: we can live this poor existence, fragile and wound clinging to Christ, because he has won death, wins our darkness and will win the darkness of the world, to make us live with him in joy, forever”. In the angelus he wrote he invoked peace. Then he Benedetto, from the loggia of San Pietro, Urbi et orbi, the believers present and the whole world, without distinctions: a sign of his dedication to all the humanity that has for this reason loved him and loves him. Finally, he took to the streets and was among the people, a sign of a ministry that makes sense if he brings Easter hope next to people’s lives, where they are, how they are. All in an incarnate way, not with abstract words but through in the body folded by suffering and disease. The same conditions for which many suffer and precisely for this reason they are often put aside and discarded, as he himself denounced ».
What did you feel in front of the news of death?
«I learned the news while I was preparing to celebrate the MONDAY OF THE Angel on Monday. The feelings of bewilderment immediately immediately gave way – in the Eucharist – to thanks for the gifts received with this pontificate and the invitation to the faithful to pray for Francesco, inviting them not to disperse in chatter, not to get lost behind reconstructions, empty words, totonomas on the succession but to look towards the same direction in which he looked at him: towards Jesus “.
And during the visit to the body?
“The visit to the body of Pope Francis was an act of tribute and prayer as is done for a loved one, who many times I had the opportunity to listen and meet. But it was also the possibility, once again, to experience the Church in his polyformity of experiences, origins, age, ways of telling faith all on pilgrimage before his body ».
What memory does he have the visit of the Pontiff to Milan and the Ambrosian lands on March 25, 2017 when you were the spokesman for the then archbishop Angelo Scola?
“Of that day I have many individual impressions and a single impression printed in my heart. The memories are related to waiting, to organizational work, to the multiple moments lived by Pope Francis in Milan. But the only impression was that of a city, a diocese, a people who loved the Pope and renewed their commitment to follow him in the joy of Christian experience, in the simplicity of a party made of encounter, community, relationship with the Lord. An experience lived in a similar way a few years earlier when Benedict XVI was to visit us ».
The Pope and the cinema. What did he love?
“Pope Francis loved cinema and has shown this passion several times. Receiving in February 2023 Foundation Authority of the show, the reality of the Italian Church that presides over and that deals with cinematographic culture, said that good cinema is what manages to “express harmony, both in joy, in pain, human harmony. For this thank you for your work. It is an evangelical work. Also a poetic work, because cinema is poetry: giving life is poetic”. Pope Francis did not like “Catholic” or “Catechistic” films but the great works – such as those of Italian neorealism – capable of telling the expectations, joys, hopes, pains of ordinary people, everyday life. He loved cinema as a text, that is, in the integrity of the work, of its artistic structure and not as a pretext, that is, as an opportunity for a parenthesis, to speak of anything else, as an illustration extrapolated from a film to deal with a figure of faith “.
What Church leaves us?
«Pope Francis leaves an even more in love with the story, of the story of all, especially of the weakest, of the last, of the discarded. He leaves us a church that looks to the world as in the only common house that looks with hope to Christ as the only and necessary Salvatore “.
