Easter Celebrations: Failed Pope Still Reassures His Faithful

Long live El Papa! Long live dad! It is 11:30 this Sunday morning and Pope Francis, seated in his Popemobile, cuts through a crowd of tens of thousands of worshipers gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Italy. Easter Sunday Mass has just ended and the Supreme Pontiff is coming to meet these Catholics from all over the world.

Flags of different countries flutter in the center of the crowd. Here is the flag of Ukraine, there is another flag of Lebanon or Brazil. A man holds his child through the barriers towards an Argentinean Jesuit. The white cart moves at a good pace, and the Holy Father, turning in his seat, blesses the crowd. The bright sun illuminates the Italian capital, and the faces of believers are relieved to see that their dad has finally been restored.

Francis was hospitalized for three days with bronchitis last week, and many saw it as a risk to his participation in the Easter celebration. Rumors of a possible resignation arose again due to his recurring health problems. Last Friday, he also had to cancel his participation in the traditional Stations of the Cross organized at the Colosseum in Rome due to the cold. But he made it a rule to celebrate the service of the Passion and the death of Jesus Christ on the same day. And on Saturday evening, the 86-year-old pope was still there to preside for two and a half hours at the Mass of the Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the presence of about 8,000 people.

Powerful political message

His triple presence, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, at Easter Mass, the culmination of the Catholic calendar, is therefore a relief, if not entirely reassuring. Because his state of health couldn’t be more fragile. The head of the Catholic Church often moves around in a wheelchair, and when he went to meet the cardinals this Sunday, Francis often showed them his knees, which gave him long-standing pain and limited mobility.

This did not prevent him during his blessing to convey, as he does every year, a political message to the powerful of this world, pointing out the “stumbling blocks” on the path to world peace. Like last year, he devoted most of it to Ukraine and wished to console “the wounded and those who lost loved ones due to the war.”

He also expressed “deep concern over the recent attacks” in the Middle East, invited Burma to “walk the path of peace” with the Rohingya, mentioned “Lebanon, which is still in search of stability and unity”, Tunisia and its “socio-economic problems ”, “a serious socio-political and humanitarian crisis” in Haiti and “victims of international terrorism” in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique and Nigeria. The Pope also thought of the 56,000 victims of the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria in February.