The
Church has the courage of a woman who defends her children, in order to
bring them to encounter her Spouse.
This was one of the main focal
points of Pope Francis’ remarks following the readings at Mass on
Tuesday morning in the chapel of the Domus sanctae Marthae in the
Vatican.
The Pope also reflected on the encounter between Jesus and the
widow of Naim, saying that the Church herself is, in history, walking in
search of her Lord.
Jesus
has, “the capacity to suffer with us, to be close to our sufferings and
make them His own,” said Pope Francis, who began his reflections with
the encounter between Jesus and the widow of Naim, of which Tuesday’s
Gospel reading tells.
He pointed out that Jesus, “had great compassion”
for this widow who had now lost her son. Jesus, he went on to say, “knew
what it meant to be a widow at that time,” and noted that the Lord has a
special love for widows, He cares for them.” Reading this passage of
the Gospel, he then said, that the widow is, “an icon of the Church ,
because the Church is in a sense widow”:
“The Bridegroom is gone
and she walks in history, hoping to find him, to meet with Him – and she
will be His true bride. In the meantime she - the Church - is alone!
The Lord is nowhere to be seen. She has a certain dimension of widowhood
... and that makes me makes me think of the widowhood of the Church.
This courageous Church, which defends her children, like the widow who
went to the corrupt judge to [press her rights] and eventually won. Our
Mother Church is courageous! She has the courage of a woman who knows
that her children are her own, and must defend them and bring them to
the meeting with her Spouse.”
The Pope reflected on some figures
of widows in the Bible, in particular the courageous Maccabean widow
with seven sons who are martyred for not renouncing God. The Bible, he
stressed, says this woman who spoke to her sons “in the local dialect,
in their first language,” and, he noted, our Mother Church speaks to us
in dialect, in “that language of true orthodoxy, which we all
understand, the language of catechism,” that, “gives us the strength to
go forward in the fight against evil”:
“This dimension of
widowhood of the Church, who is journeying through history, hoping to
meet, to find her Husband… Our Mother the Church is thus! She is a
Church that, when she is faithful, knows how to cry. When the Church
does not cry, something is not right. She weeps for her children, and
prays! A Church that goes forward and does rear her children, gives them
strength and accompanies them until the final farewell in order to
leave them in the hands of her Spouse, who at the end will come to
encounter her. This is our Mother Church! I see her in this weeping
widow. And what does the Lord say to the Church? “Do not cry. I am with
you, I’ll take you, I’ll wait for you there, in the wedding, the last
nuptials, those of the Lamb. Stop [your tears]: this son of yours was
dead, now he lives.”
And this , he continued, “is the dialogue of
the Lord with the Church.” She, “defends the children, but when she
sees that the children are dead, she crys, and the Lord says to her: ‘I
am with you and your son is with me.’” As he told the boy at Naim to get
up from his deathbed, the Pope added, many times Jesus also tells us to
get up, “when we are dead because of sin and we are going to ask for
forgiveness.” And then what does Jesus “when He forgives us, when He
gives us back our life?” He Returns us to our mother:
“Our
reconciliation with the Lord end in the dialogue ‘You, me and the priest
who gives me pardon’; it ends when He restores us to our mother. There
ends reconciliation, because there is no path of life, there is no
forgiveness, there is no reconciliation outside of Mother Church. So,
seeing this poor widow, all these things come to me somewhat randomly -
But I see in this widow the icon of the widowhood of the Church who is
on a journey to find her Bridegroom. I get the urge to ask the Lord for
the grace to be always confident of this “mommy” who defends us, teaches
us, helps us grow and [teaches] us to speak the dialect.”