By Devin Watkins
In late Oct 2024, torrential rains flooded the Spanish city of Valencia, killing around 230 people and causing massive property damage.
Thousands of volunteers and nonprofit organizations mobilized to assist those affected by one of Spain’s deadliest natural disasters.
On Thursday, three months later, Pope Francis met with the seminarians, formators, and bishops of the Archdiocese of Valencia, along with several other Spanish dioceses, for an audience in the Vatican.
“The storm was not just an atypical phenomenon that we merely hope will not happen again,” he told them. “It is the extrapolation of what every human being experiences when faced with loss, feeling alone, displaced, and in need of support to move forward.”
The Pope said the role of priests is to “bind up the brokenhearted” and provide spiritual support for people amid the large and small disasters of daily life.
He admitted that he found it difficult to express his feelings when thinking about the pain Valencia residents experienced as they celebrated Christmas in the wake of the floods.
“Yours is a pain and mourning that, despite its harshness, opens us to hope, for in forcing us to reach rock bottom and leave behind everything that seemed to sustain us, it allows us to go beyond,” he said.
People cannot be left alone to face the darkness, urged the Pope. Rather, he said, the work of so many volunteers and the Catholic Church after the storm were expressions of God’s tenderness.
Pope Francis pointed out that “hope is not optimism,” which is merely a superficial attitude, while hope calls us to move beyond empty phrases to search for deeper meaning.
“Our hope has a name; Jesus; God who was not disgusted by our clay and who, instead of saving us from the clay, became clay for us.”
Each priest, he added, is called to become an alter Christus, another Christ by becoming “clay in the weeping of the people.”
“When you see broken people; because in Valencia there are broken people who have lost their lives in pieces; give them pieces, fragments, of yourselves, just as Christ does in the Eucharist,” he said.
In conclusion, Pope Francis invited the future priests of Valencia to give of themselves freely, just as they have received everything freely. – Vatican News
