The Pope speaks with difficulty, “with this great cold”, and asks “this brother to read catechesis. He will read it better than me ». Only pronounces only greetings in Spanish and Italian. At the end of the hearing, he does it to ask, once again, the prayer for peace. “Let’s think about the countries that suffer the war,” he says. “The battered Ukraine, Israel, Jordan, many countries that are suffering there, remember the displaced people of Palestine and pray for them”.
For catechesis, the theme of this Wednesday, within the cycle “Jesus Christ our Hope”, paid attention to Mary – “and Blessed Colei who believed” – which, as Luca says, ran quickly from Elizabeth. Francesco wanted to explain the meaning of the Magnificat. «The Virgin Mary visits Santa Elisabetta; But it is above all Jesus, in the mother’s womb, who visits his people, as Zaccaria says in his hymn of praise ». When Mary, pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit the cousin “does not choose to protect himself from the world, he does not fear the dangers and judgments of others, but he meets others. When you feel loved, you experience a force that circulates love ». Mary “warns the push of love and goes to help a woman who is her relative, but is also an old woman who welcomes, after long wait, an unexpected, tiring pregnancy to face at her age. But the Virgin also goes to Elizabeth to share the faith in the god of the impossible and hope in the fulfillment of his promises “.
The greeting of Mary, the “full of grace”, provokes the prophecy in the child, John, who the elderly brings in his womb and arouses a double blessing in her: “Blessed are you among the women and blessed the fruit of your womb!” , writes Luca. But there is also bliss: “Blessed the one who believed in fulfilling what the Lord said to her.”
The Magnificat, “this praise to the God Salvatore, gushed from the heart of his humble servant, is a solemn memorial that summarizes and performs the prayer of Israel. He is woven in biblical resonances, a sign that Mary does not want to sing “out of the choir” but tune in to the fathers, enhancing her compassion towards the humble, those little ones that Jesus in his preaching will declare “blessed” ».
Still, explains Catechesis, “the massive presence of the Pasquale reason also makes the Magnificat a song of redemption, which has by the background the memory of the liberation of Israel from Egypt. The verbs are all in the past, impregnated with a love memory that turns on the present of faith and illuminates the future with hope: Maria sings the grace of the past but is the woman of the present who brings the future on her womb ».
The song is divided into two parts. The first “praises the action of God in Mary, a microcosm of the people of God who fully adheres to the alliance; The second sweeps on the work of the father in the macrocosm of the history of his children, through three key words: memory-mercy-promise ».
The Lord, he explains in the text of Catechesis, began to save his people since the exodus, “remembering the universal blessing promised to Abraham. The Lord, God faithful forever, has made an uninterrupted flow of merciful “generation of generation in generation” on the people faithful to the alliance, and now manifests the fullness of salvation in his son, sent to save the people from his sins ” . From Abraham to Jesus Christ and the community of believers, Easter appears as well as the hermeneutic category to understand every subsequent liberation, up to that created by the Messiah in the fullness of the times “.
