“It pains me to see the dead guys – both Russians and Ukrainians, I don’t care – not coming back. It’s tough.” Pope Francis therefore has no doubts about what to ask the world as a gift for his tenth anniversary, which occurs today: “Peace, we need peace”. Hence, three words that correspond to the “three dreams of the Pope” for the Church, for the world and for those who govern the world, for humanity: “Brotherhood, tears, smiles…”. It’s what you hear in Popecast, the first podcast created by the Pope with the Vatican mediain which Jorge Mario Bergoglio talks about himself ten years after his election.
“The first word that comes to me is that it seems like yesterday…”. Conducted by the Pope in Santa Marta with the Vatican News journalist Salvatore Cernuzio, it is not an interview, like the many that are coming out in this period, but rather a new thread of thoughts on the ten years of his pontificate. Ten years: lived in “tension”, he says, in a time that is superior to space and which has seen encounters, journeys, faces alternate.
Francis smiles in front of the microphone with the Vatican media logo and asks: “A podcast? What is it?”. “Nice, let’s do it.” So the question: what do you feel you share with the world on the occasion of this milestone for your life and ministry? “Time is pressing… it’s in a hurry. And when you want to seize today, it’s already yesterday. Living like this is new. These ten years have been like this: a tension, living in tension”. Of the thousands of audiences, of the hundreds of visits to dioceses and parishes and of the forty apostolic journeys to every corner of the world, the Pope keeps in his heart a precise memory.
He identifies it as “the most beautiful moment”: “The meeting in St. Peter’s Square with the old”, the audience, that is, with grandparents from all over the world on 28 September 2014. “The old are wisdom and they help me a lot I’m old too, aren’t I?”
On the other hand, there have been several bad moments and all linked to the horror of war. First the visits to the military cemeteries of Redipuglia and Anzio, the commemoration of the Normandy landings, then the vigil to avert the war in Syria and now the barbarism that has been going on for over a year in Ukraine. “Behind the wars there is the arms industry, this is diabolical”, says Francis.
Ten years of Francis’ pontificate, the voices of the faithful in the Vatican
And he, a bishop who came from the end of the world, did not expect to be the Pope who led the universal Church in the time of the Third World War: “I did not expect it … I thought that Syria was a singular thing, then the others arrived “.
Ten years of pontificate, Paolo Fresu pays homage to Francis with an unpublished work
Source: Ansa
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