(ANSA) – ROME, JUL 27 – On the grassy shores of Lake Sant’Anna, about 72 km west of Edmonton, the destination of a Catholic pilgrimage every year since the end of the nineteenth century precisely on today’s feast of the saint, Pope Francis launches a multiple appeal to listen to the “maternal heartbeat” of the earth, to a fraternity based on the union “of the distant”, to a Church that does not entrench itself in the defense of the institution in spite of the “search for truth”.
And to his “indigenous brothers” he says: “You are precious to me and to the Church”. There are many members of the indigenous communities, in fact, among the approximately ten thousand who participate in this traditional ‘Lac Ste. Anne Pilgrimage’, and – in a ‘country’ festival atmosphere – join the pilgrims coming mainly from Canada and the United States. Northwestern United, who come to this lake to bathe in its waters considered holy and pray. It is a place that has also been sacred to the natives for millennia: called Wakamne, ‘Lake of God’, by the Nakota Sioux and ‘Lake of the Spirit’ by the Cree people, known to the natives as a place of healing.
The Pope, accompanied by the traditional sounds of the drum, celebrates the Liturgy of the Word, preceded by an unprecedented “blessing of the lake”. “Here, immersed in creation, there is another heartbeat that we can hear, the maternal one of the earth – he says in the homily in Spanish -. And just as the heartbeat of babies, right from the womb, is in harmony with that of mothers, so to grow as human beings we need to set the rhythms of life to those of the creation that gives us life “.
(HANDLE).
Source: Ansa
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