by Lorena Bianchetti
Pope Francis returned to the father’s house “. There are no right words to describe the mood of such a significant loss. Pope Francis has caught us again. His exits after the hospital hospitalization had made us think of a slow but possible recovery. He had made him hope his strength, his tenacity, his courage. He, the man of the Gospel, of the Gospel incarnate also in quotes. Pope Francis was free, as Jesus taught us, authentic, witness of a humanity capable of bringing you back to the essence of things, of those that really count and that make you touch the purest happiness with his hand. I had the honor of meeting him and talking to us many times and not only for professional reasons but also in many private meetings with my family. I remember that afternoon who met my daughter, outdoors. We went to Santa Marta, at her house, my husband, the little one and the little ones. He was a few months old. We knocked on the door and you open it, his smile, his hug.
We sat down and we started a conversation that still excites me today. “I had noticed a different face for some time and I told myself that, in my opinion you were waiting,” he confessed to me smiling sweetly. Pope Francis, every Sunday, had the television on before looking out the window to recite the Angelus and told me that he had seen the broadcast that I have been conducting for several years several times. He also said it publicly but, above all, he demonstrated it in the many Sundays in which, during the Angelus, he had the goodness to mention what we were facing live. He knew how to read the heart Pope Francis, he knew how to read the faces and the soul of those in front of him. The image of outsiders who died his hands as it is typical of the children to whom the gums for the teeth who have to come out is still brings back to such a familiar, sweet, true atmosphere that today, with his departure, I look at with melancholy and also with an amazement that I do not get used to.
Pope Francis were the people, all, regardless of the role they played or the wallet they had. The heart was not stolen from the privileges or charges of responsibility, indeed it has humanized labels and superstructures, predefined speeches and predetermined agendas. The suburbs, the last both from a geographical and existential point of view. It is from them that life is understood, it is through them that the heart awakens, that we undress the useless stereotypes of a world that wants to make us more anaffective and facade. Instead, the man who came from the end of the world was able to put us in the mirror, like that time in Lampedusa, was able to awaken consciences, of talking to us clearly, clearly because his heart was clear. He, who in his simplicity had the authority of those who live in line, the strength of the giants who work for the good, who are at the service of the good and who do not use it to get their ego to get to gone it. “No to a facade faith but service!” He said several times. He, whose gestures often said more than many words, he, the man of the people capable of amaze and embrace. As happened on my 50th birthday when I receive from him, always in one of the private meetings at Casa Santa Marta, a Byzantine icon that today keeps me company on my bedside table. Or even when, through Don Marco Pozza, the sleeping Saint Joseph makes me to entrust the prayers to be presented to God.
Thanks Pope Francis, make a good trip, thanks for the gift you have been for the world and thanks for the gift you have been for me and for my family. We bring your smiles, your embrace, your irony, your human warmth, your tenderness and strength at the same time, your listening and your important reflections on the world with us. You have given us so much, all yourself, until the end and now it is up to us, to each of us indiscriminately to collect and concretize the beauty of the authentic fraternity you invited us to.
