Pope concludes weekend pastoral visit to northeast Italy

(May 09, 2011) Pope Benedict XVI carried a message of the new evangelization to northeastern Italy during the weekend, urging the region to remember that the faith is more than a cultural and social tradition. The Pope visited Venice and Aquilea Saturday and Sunday, delivering four discourses and a homily. Sunday afternoon, he celebrated Mass in Mestre, near Venice, which was attended by 300,000 people who were not only from dioceses of the region, but also from neighbouring Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and also Germany. In his homily the Pope lamented that the Christian faith that has accompanied the people of the region for centuries, even amidst persecutions and trials, today runs the risk of being a mere social and cultural superficiality, depriving faith of its truth and its deepest elements. He compared this situation to Sunday’s Gospel episode of the two disciples of Emmaus, who depressed and discouraged, were distancing themselves from the Jerusalem of the Crucified and Risen One. The Pope said, “The problem of evil, of pain and suffering, the problem of injustice and abuse, of fear of others, of outsiders, and those who arrive to our lands from far away and seem to threaten who we are, prompts Christians of today to say with sadness: 'We had hoped that the Lord would free us from evil, from pain, from suffering, from fear, from injustice." The Pope invited the region’s Christians to rediscover Christ, through the Word of God, and the sacrament of his Body and Blood, which, he said, “restores our eyes of faith, so as to see everything and everyone with the eyes of God and the light of his love.”
Earlier, upon his arrival in Aquileia on Saturday, Pope Benedict also emphasized the importance of faith as the foundation for everything. “Only in Christ in fact can humanity receive hope for the future; only from him can humanity draw the meaning and power of forgiveness, of justice, of peace,” he said. Later, on Saturday, addressing ecclesiastical representatives gathered in the Basilica of Aquileia, the Pope urged Christians to bring the values of their faith into every sphere, including politics. He said that the mission that God entrusts to the churches of northeastern Italy today, “is that of bearing witness to the love of God for man." This, he said, should be manifested in "works of love and choices on behalf of real people, beginning with the weakest, the most fragile, the most defenceless, those who are least self-sufficient, such as the poor, the elderly, the sick, the disabled.” In the context of an “often exasperated pursuit of economic well-being” and of “grave economic and financial crisis,” he added, the faithful are called to “the Christian sense of life, through the explicit proclamation of the Gospel, brought with delicate pride and profound joy in the various areas of daily existence.”