We publish the full text of the intervention of the Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, pronounced on Thursday afternoon, on the eve of Ferragosto, in Monte Sole, in Marzabotto, on the occasion of the prayer for peace in the name of the innocent victims in the Holy Land proposed by the Church of Bologna and by the small family of the Annunciation.
This is a moment of prayer. Prayer does not take us out of the world but inside. Suffering becomes intercession, because creation and creatures ask for life, future, hope. They don’t ask war, but peace! Each name of killed children is a request to God, but also to men, because we listen to them, we let ourselves be touched by the injustice that overwhelmed their fragility.
Their death, of all of them and everyone, arouse the tears of emotion and the finally far -sighted and not tragically opportunistic choices. There is no ranking in pain. We are here to ask that in the Holy Land every person, starting with the little ones, does not lose his life because of his brother.
Arturo Paoli said that original sin is fratricide and only when we have the awareness of being responsible for death, or less life, of the poor, to be without pride, superior, distant, as if they were not our flesh or did not belong to our breed, only in this case we find the humility to pass from “fratricids to brothers”. Jesus warns us by stating that even those who “get angry with their brother will have to be subjected to the judgment” (Mt. 5:22).
In this place, Where the temple of God who is every person was profaned by the violence and blood of Abele scattered, today we hear the voice of our brother’s blood shouting from so many soils of the earth (Gen. 4,10), that cry that God makes his and that men ignore, do not consider. This is a place of darkness and light, of death and life, of the massacre of the innocent and hope on the world, of many Rachels who cry their children who are no longer, and of light of life that does not end.
Here we feel clear the judgment of God on our life, a judgment we need because we do not believe it to be quiet in our sureness, Without shame for what happens, trivially prisoners of the short -sighted and guilty self -centeredness. The judgment is actually two questions, with which we have to deal and it is up to us to find the answer that makes us understand, change, let us love.
The first: “Where’s Abele, your brother?”. God holds Abele and always defends fraternity. Us? And the second: “What did you do?”, How could you do it, but also “What did you not do when you saw me that I was hungry, thirsty, I was naked, prisoner, sick?”. “Where is you, where is your heart?”
We hear all these little brothers. The judgment of God does not domesticated, does not indulge in any of our justifications or convictions, cynical calculations, blasphemous obsessions, It helps us to return to ourselves, wondering about our brother to understand who we are, to find him.
This place wanted the Cardinal Biffi Forty years ago to entrust him to the small family of the Annunciation, born from the charisma of Don Giuseppe Dossetti. On that occasion he wanted to tell him “with our thank you, the esteem and affection that we nourish for him” and entrust “the task of suffrage action for those who have imported the whole region of their blood …; the task of prayer for the concord of peoples and factions, and for the conversion of hearts; the task of the announcement to those who will come here, of true peace, which is the messianic peace brought by Christ”.
That’s why today, With so much disorientation in the heart, we are here, to descend into the abyss of this despair, to understand their responsibilities, to transform the signs of the times into signs of hope, To ask that other innocent people do not lose their lives. In front of this wide and spiritual horizon, we feel necessary to get rid of the chatter full of vanity and insolent superficiality, from ignorant polarizations, interested and presumptuous, with guilty fearless, by the hatreds and words that cultivate resentment and revenge, by affected political readings that offend and deform the truth, from the nationalistic emphasis that betray the need for brotherhood, of universal brotherhood and sacred respect for each person.
Here every day we pray for all the victims of the brother who raises his hands on his brother.
Here is not biased, But we are looking for, finds itself and chooses the only part that is that of God and is to reconstruct the fraternity, which can save man from destroying himself.
The part of God is always together, because God is all in all, it is love that unites, it is present in every human person in which he blown the breath of life. Don’t kill! Don’t kill! We also listen to the angels of these little ones whose suffering is brought to God. Every child is innocent. “The children of the assassins are not murderers, they are children,” said Wiesel.
The Qohelet Rabbah (7: 1: 3) says that each human being has three names. “One with whom he is called by his father and mother; one with whom others call him; and one with whom he is called in the memory of humanity”. Each person is a name, his and our name!
Today we remember them because nobody can ever be a number, a statistics!
For this we will pronounce one by one their names starting from the killed October 7 from Hamas’s murderous madness, from which you have to distance themselves, as from any ideology or calculation that reduces the other to an object, to something residual, to an enemy.
They They ask us to commit all to find or pursue the way of peace with more intelligence and passion, starting from the ceasefire and to offer the conditions to do so, From the liberation of the hostages to not taking an entire people hostage.
