Those who know Pope Francis well is not at all surprised that, before being hospitalized for a bronchitis then degenerated in bilateral pneumonia, he tried to resist the insistence of the doctors to take care of the hospital and no longer in Santa Marta. The clinical picture has now imposed it. But how could he get lost in the best of the Jubilee, that of the artists, certainly one of the most significant events of this year? Just think of the intensity of the homily, then entrusted last Sunday to Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the dicastery for culture and education, of which a key step sounds like this: “You are called to be witnesses of the revolutionary vision of the beatitudes. Your mission is not only of creating beauty, but of revealing the truth, goodness and beauty hidden in the folds of history, of giving voice to those who have no voice, to transform pain into hope ». Communicating hope beyond all hope with the strength of art, with that ability to invoke and evoke that he knows how to break the chains of the eternal present in which we are imprisoned to launch ourselves in the early bars of a flattened world. The hope, a theme not surprisingly the cornerstone of the magisterium of this pontiff, especially in this jubilee year.
Until the last Francesco he did not lose a private and public hearing, even if on Sunday 9 February – he was missing his breath! – He had not been able to read the homily to the Jubilee of the Armed Forces and had had to entrust her to Archbishop Diego Ravelli. The meeting with people loads him, gives him back that energy that the various ailments he suffers from and the age, 88 years just completed, try to remove them. Francesco lives in some surprising rhythms, with an agenda that not even a boy.
After the mass, from 7 and throughout the morning, he receives groups more or less numerous from all over the world in the Vatican, with which he entertains after reading the official speech. And he meets, holds his hand to everyone, listen to what everyone wants to tell him, he accepts gifts from everyone and of all kinds.
In the last weekend of January, to the Jubilee of the communicators in which I participated, in the courtroom Paolo VI Francesco skipped the reading of his speech, entrusting it to the prefect of the dicastery for communication, and preferred to dedicate all the time to spend between the first files and shake hands with those present.
From where Pope Francis draws all this energy, knowing that he has never been allowed a holiday for many years now, well from before going up to Peter’s throne? I believe that this reserve of energy comes from its deeply pastoral soul, linked to a deeply Christian vision of man. The very face of Christ is registered in each face. One thing is to preach it, another is to live it. And he really lives it.
