ROME (ITALY)
National Catholic Reporter
March 1, 2019
By NCR Editorial Staff
Just inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, to the right, is Michelangelo’s arresting sculpture, the Pietà. Layers upon layers present themselves for pondering. The wonder, initially, is that a piece of Carrara marble could yield such a luminous rendering of maternal agony. The young woman is resolute. She appears utterly exhausted in this moment of dismal uncertainty. The bloodied head of a son whose unpredictable, itinerant life ended on a hill of horrors, droops beyond her right arm. Her worry and anxiety are spent. Her burden now is death, a moment of emptiness.
It is from this raw instant of humiliation, of futility and apparent abandonment — the joke in the legend proclaiming “King of the Jews” — that our hope springs. No Resurrection occurs without it.
Throughout the church in the United States, in varying degrees, people are wondering some version of: “What do we do next? What can we do?”
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