UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent
Paul Vallely
It ought to have been, for Pope Francis, a day of happiness. It was the first visit of his life to Assisi, the home of the saint whose name the new pontiff chose as a kind of mission statement. But the news came in that as many as 300 migrants were feared dead after the sinking of an overloaded boat off the coast of the southern island of Lampedusa. “Today is a day for crying,” he said instead.
Yet that was apt too. Lampedusa, the first European port of overcrowded call for many people fleeing poverty and war in Africa, was the first place to which Francis travelled outside Rome as Pope. The great saint of Assisi, who cast off a pampered life as the son of a rich merchant to live among the destitute, may be the great exemplar of embraced poverty. But it is in places like Lampedusa that the reality of involuntary poverty in this globalised world is made manifest.
As Pope Francis showed, however, you do not have to travel far to encounter the marginalised. At the Serafico Institute, a charity for seriously disabled children, the Pope stopped to greet every child – more than 100 individuals — kissing some, bending to hear a whispered greeting, embracing those unable to speak. By the time he left this first appointment he was already 45 minutes behind schedule. Itineraries do not matter so much as people, was the implied message.
He was more overt when he entered the room where St Francis had stripped himself of his rich clothes to embrace a life of poverty. The local archbishop asked the Pope to say the Lord’s Prayer there, as St Francis had done eight centuries before. “The Our Father?” the Pope replied. “But I want to talk about what the Church today need to strip away to emulate the gesture Francis made.”
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