Irina and Albina are friends: they share the hospital ward at the biomedical campus in Rome, at the Palliative Care Center. Together they live the fatigue of having to alleviate people’s sufferings, which often cannot be healed but only treated with love and attention to the end. And the two friends did it, always together, in these hard months of Covid. But then the war came: Irina is a Ukrainian nurse, Albina a Russian resident.
Irina recounts that moment: “When we met shortly after the war began, Albina came to the ward. I was on duty. Our gaze was enough: our eyes filled with tears and Albina began to apologize. She felt guilty and apologized. I reassured her that she had nothing to do with any of this. “
Carrying the cross together, in silence and prayer, on Good Friday at the Colosseum in the celebration presided over by the Pope, it was then a natural decision because, explain the two women, “this war has united us more”. Among other things, they were chosen precisely for the message of friendship witnessed in a report on Tg1 in the first days of the war. But after the controversy of these hours, with the Ukrainian embassy to the Holy See asking the Vatican to rethink the choice, things have changed because the two friends have been projected into a bigger situation than them, in geopolitical scenarios far from the simple life of two friends who share the fatigue of work, but also the coffee at the machine, the homesickness but also the light-heartedness of their young age. Now broken by the conflict.
The two women will still be at the Colosseum, with the cross in hand. “Together we could do a lot. Humanity must unite together to try to find peace and a solution to everything that is happening,” Irina told the Vatican media.
The same choice, that of having a station of the Cross conducted by two friends, one Russian and one Ukrainian, was made by the Franciscans in their online celebration this afternoon.
Dina from Dnipro, a city close to the hottest area of the conflict, and Julia from Moscow but today in Gdansk, Poland, where she found a job. Both are part of the Secular Franciscan Order, the lay arm of the Franciscan family. Together they prayed: “Lord, do not let hatred sow destruction, both in the homes of innocent people and in our souls; give the grace of reconciliation and forgiveness to the peoples of Ukraine and Russia”.
Source: Ansa
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