By Christopher Wells
At the traditional Mass offered in suffrage for the souls of Cardinals and Bishops who have died in the course of the past year, Pope Leo XIV prayed that “their souls might be washed from every stain” and that they might “shine like stars in the sky.”
At the same time, he expressed his hope that “their spiritual encouragement might reach us, still pilgrims on earth, in the silence of prayer: ‘Hope in God: for I shall again praise Him, my help and my God.”
The ‘flavour’ of Christian hope
In particular, Pope Leo prayed “with great affection for the elect soul of Pope Francis, who died after opening the Holy Door and imparting the Easter Blessing to Rome and the whole world.” The Jubilee Year, he said, gives this Mass “a distinctive flavour – the flavour of Christian hope.”
The Holy Father highlighted the message of the Gospel account of the disciples of Emmaus, whose encounter with the Risen Christ offers “a vivid representation of the pilgrimage of hope.”
The tragedy of violent death
Their encounter began with the experience of the “violent death” of Jesus, the kind of death suffered by so many innocent “little ones” in our day, deaths that are tragic and frightening because they are “disfigured by sin.”
“We cannot and must not say ‘laudato sí’” – praise be to you – “for this death, because God the Father does not desire it, and He sent his Son into the world to free us from it,” the Pope said.
Jesus rekindles faith and hope in our hearts
Rather, Jesus suffered precisely “to enter into His glory and give us eternal life.” He alone, the Pope said, “can take this corrupt death upon Himself and within Himself without being corrupted by it.”
When we confess that “He alone has the words of eternal life” we acknowledge that His words “have the power to rekindle faith and hope in our hearts.” This hope, the Holy Father said, “is no longer the hope had before and had lost,” but is instead “a new reality, a gift, a grace of the Risen One: it is the Easter hope.”
Easter hope transforms death
With that Easter hope, Pope Leo continued, we can sing in the words of Saint Francis of Assisi, “Praise be to you, my Lord, for our sister bodily death.” “The love of Christ crucified and risen has transfigured death: from an enemy, it has made it a sister.”
Although we are saddened by the death of loved ones, and even scandalized at the death of innocents “carried off by illness, or worse, by human violence,” Christians nonetheless continue to hope, “because even the most tragic death cannot prevent our Lord from welcoming our soul into His arms and transforming our mortal bodies, even the most disfigured, into the image of His glorious body.”
Witnesses and teachers of Paschal hope
It is precisely this “new Paschal hope,” Pope Leo said, that Pope Francis, as well as the Cardinals and Bishops who have died throughout the year, “lived, witnessed, and taught.”
“The Lord called them and appointed them shepherds in His Church,” the Pope said, and through their ministry,” they have guided “the righteous… on the path of the Gospel with the wisdom that comes from Christ, Who has become for us wisdom, justice, sanctification, and redemption.” – Vatican News
