Day 3 of the Novendiales for Pope Francis April 28, 2025

At Mass on the third day of the Novemdiales in suffrage for Pope Francis, the Cardinal Vicar General for the Diocese of Rome reminds the faithful, as they mourn the late Pope, that death is not the end because ‘The grain must die to bear fruit.’

Day 3 of the Novendiales for Pope Francis

EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION ON THE III DAY OF THE NOVENDIALS

HOMILY BY HIS MOST REVEREND EMINENCE MR. CARDINAL BALDASSARE REINA,

VICAR GENERAL OF HIS HOLINESS FOR THE DIOCESE OF ROME

Basilica of St. Peter’s

Monday, April 28, 2025

________________________

My slender voice is here today to express the prayer and sorrow of a portion of the Church, that of Rome, burdened with the responsibility that history has assigned to it.

In these days Rome is a people mourning its bishop, a people together with others who have lined up, finding a space among the places of the city to mourn and pray, like sheep without a shepherd.

Sheep without a shepherd: a metaphor that allows us to recompose the feelings of these days, and to go through the depth of the image we received from John’s Gospel, the grain of wheat that must die in order to bear fruit. A parable that tells of the shepherd’s love for his flock.

In this time, as the world burns, and few have the courage to proclaim the Gospel by translating it into a vision of a possible and concrete future, humanity appears as sheep without a shepherd. This image comes out of Jesus’ mouth as He rests His gaze on the crowds that followed Him.

Around Him are the apostles who report to Him all that they had done and taught. The words, the gestures, the actions learned from the Master, the announcement of the kingdom of the coming God, the necessity of the change of life, combined with signs capable of giving flesh to the words: a caress, an outstretched hand, disarmed speech, without judgment, liberating, not afraid of contact with impurity. In performing this service, necessary to awaken faith, to arouse hope that the evil present in the world would not have the last word, that life is stronger than death, they had not even had time to eat.

Jesus felt the burden, and this comforts us now.

Jesus the true shepherd of history in need of his salvation, knows the burden on each of us in continuing his mission, especially as we will find ourselves looking for the first of his shepherds on earth.

As in the time of the first disciples, there are accomplishments and also failures, weariness and fear. The scope is immense, and temptations creep in, veiling the only thing that matters: to desire, to seek, to work in expectation of “a new heaven and a new earth.”

And it cannot be, this, the time for equlibrisms, tactics, prudence, the time that panders to the instinct to turn back, or worse, to rivalries and power alliances, but a radical disposition to enter into God’s dream entrusted to our poor hands is needed.

I am struck at this moment by what Revelation tells us, “I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven from near God, ready as a bride adorned for her husband.

A new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem.

In the face of the announcement of this newness, we could not acquiesce to that mental and spiritual laziness that binds us to the forms of God’s experience and church practices known in the past and which we wish must be repeated endlessly, subjugated by the fear of the losses associated with the necessary changes.

I am thinking of the multiple processes of reform in the life of the Church initiated by Pope Francis, and which encroach beyond religious affiliations. People have acknowledged to him that he has been a universal shepherd, and Peter’s boat needs this broad sailing that encroaches and surprises.

These people carry restlessness in their hearts and I seem to glimpse a question: what will happen to the processes that have been initiated?

Our duty should be to discern and order what has begun, in light of what our mission requires of us, in the direction of a new heaven and a new earth, adorning the Bride for the Bridegroom. Whereas we might seek to clothe the Bride according to worldly conveniences, guided by ideological pretensions that tear apart the unity of Christ’s garments.

To seek a shepherd today means above all to seek a leader who can handle the fear of loss in the face of the demands of the Gospel.

To seek a pastor who has the gaze of Jesus, an epiphany of God’s humanity in a world that has inhuman traits.

Seeking a pastor who confirms that we must walk together, composing ministries and charisms: we are people of God constituted to proclaim the Gospel.

Jesus, looking at the people who follow him, feels compassion vibrate within him: he sees women, men, children, old and young, poor and sick, and no one to take care of them, who can feed their hunger from the bites of life that has become hard, and their hunger for the Word. He, in the face of those people, feels that he is their Bread that does not disappoint, their water that quenches endless thirst, the balm that heals their wounds.

He feels the same compassion as Moses who at the end of his days, from the top of the mountain of Abarim, of from facing the Land he will not be able to plow, looking at the multitude he had led, he prays to the Lord that those people will not be reduced to being a flock without a shepherd, a people he cannot keep with him, a people who must move on.

That prayer is now our prayer, the prayer of the whole Church and of all women and men who ask to be guided and sustained in the toil of life, amid doubts and contradictions, orphaned of a word that guides amid siren songs that flatter instincts of self-redemption, that breaks loneliness, gathers waste, that does not give in to bullying, and has the courage not to bend the Gospel to the tragic compromises of fear, to complicity with worldly logics, to alliances that are blind and deaf to the signs of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ compassion is that of the prophets who manifest God’s distress at seeing the people scattered and abused by bad shepherds, by hirelings who take advantage of the flock, and who flee when they see the wolf coming. The bad shepherds do not care about the sheep, they abandon them in danger, and because of that they will be kidnapped and scattered.

Whereas the good shepherd offers his life for his sheep.

The page from John’s Gospel proclaimed in this Eucharistic liturgy speaks of this radical shepherd’s disposition, presenting us with the testimony of how Jesus is able to see beyond death, when the hour would come that would glorify his mission. The hour of death on the cross that manifests unconditional love for all.

“If the grain of wheat that fell into the ground does not die, it remains alone.” The grain of wheat that sought the earth with the ‘incarnation of the Word, fallen to raise those who fall, come to seek those who are lost.

His death is a sowing that leaves us suspended at that hour, when the seed is no longer seen, shrouded by the earth that hides it making us fear that it has been wasted. A suspension that might distress us, but which can become a threshold of hope, a crack in doubt, a light in the night, a garden of Easter.

The promised fruitfulness belongs to the disposition to death; to become chewed wheat, hostage to unfaithfulness and ingratitude to which Jesus, the good shepherd who offers his life for his sheep, responds with the forgiveness sought from the Father as he dies abandoned by his friends.

The good shepherd sows with his own death, forgiving his enemies, preferring their salvation, the salvation of all, to his own.

If we want to be faithful to the Lord, to the grain of wheat that fell into the ground, we must do so by sowing with our lives.

And how can we not remember the Psalm, “he who sows in weeping will reap in joy”!

There are times like ours when, like the farmer referred to by the psalmist, sowing becomes an extreme gesture, moved by the radicality of an act of faith.

It is a time of famine; the seed cast on the earth is the one taken from the last supply without which one dies. The farmer weeps because he knows that this last act is asking him to put his life at risk.

But God does not abandon His people, He does not leave His shepherds alone, He will not allow as with His Son that He be abandoned in the tomb, in the grave of the earth.

Our faith holds the promise of a joyful harvest but one that will have to pass through the death of the seed that is our life.

That extreme, total, exhausting act of the sower made me think back to Pope Francis’ Easter Day, to that unsparing pouring out of himself in blessing and embracing his people the day before he died. The last act of his unsparing sowing the proclamation of God’s mercies.

Thank you Pope Francis.

May Mary, the holy Virgin whom we, in Rome, venerate Salus populi romani, who now flanks and watches over his mortal remains, receive his soul and protect us in following his mission. Amen.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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