Novendiales 7th Day: May 2, 2025

At 5 p.m. this afternoon in the Vatican Basilica, the Eucharistic Celebration in suffrage of the Roman Pontiff Francis took place on the seventh day of the Novendiales. The Concelebration was presided over by His Eminence Cardinal Claudio Guigerotti, Former Prefect of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches.

Novendiales 7th Day: May 2, 2025

Beatitudes, venerable Cardinal Fathers, brothers and sisters, a few days ago we prayed over the body of our Holy Father Francis and over that body we proclaimed our unwavering faith in the resurrection of the dead. In these days our certainty and invocation continue so that the Lord may look with mercy upon his faithful servant.

For the resurrection, as the First Reading reminds us, is not a phenomenon intrinsic to human nature. It is God who resurrects us, through his Spirit. From the waters of Baptism we have emerged as new creatures, family members of God, his intimates or, as St. Paul says, adopted children and no longer slaves. And it is precisely because we are children that in the same Spirit we are allowed to cry out our invocation, “Abba, Father.” Associated with this cry is the whole creation which, in labor pains, awaits its healing. They seem to have so little value today for creation and the human person. Yet there are Cardinals among us, such as those from Africa, who spontaneously feel the beauty of the fruit of these labor pains, for a new life is of inestimable value to their peoples.

Then emerges the theme of creation as a companion on humanity’s journey and in solidarity with it, just as it asks for solidarity from humankind, so that it may be respected and healed. This is a theme that was very dear to our Pope Francis.

Around us we do nothing but perceive the cry of creation and in it that of the one who is destined for glory and is the purpose for which creation was intended: the human person. It cries out the earth but above all it cries out a humanity overwhelmed by hatred, itself the result of a profound devaluation of the value of life, which, as we have heard, for us Christians is participation in the family of God, even to the point of concorporeality and consanguinity with Christ the Lord, whom we are celebrating in this sacrament of the Eucharist.

Very often this desperate humanity struggles to express in cry its prayer and invocation to the God of life. And it is then, St. Paul reminds us, that the spirit intervenes within us and makes our rocky silences and our unexpressed tears an invocation to our God with inexpressible groans or, as well may be translated, with unexpressed groans, that is, silent. This is an expression so dear to the Eastern Christian world, which sees in the inability to express God (apophasis) one of the characteristics of theology: contemplation of the incomprehensible, a vain attempt to remove the veil from the sum truth and thus, at best, the possibility of saying, as St. Thomas Aquinas would repeat in the West, not what God is, but what He is not.

Here is a great lesson for us who often feel that we are the masters of God, the perfect knowers of truth, while we are only pilgrims who have been given the Word, which is the incarnate Son of God, because what has given us the gift of living in the glory of God is only the fruit of grace and of that infusion of the Holy Spirit that makes us, precisely, “spiritual.” And in the East, spiritual father and mother are the monk, nun or otherwise the guide of those who seek God. Even we in the West, significantly before we called these people spiritual “directors,” we called them spiritual fathers and mothers. An interesting change.

In this Eucharist we intend to unite ourselves as we can and know how, even in our aridities, distractions, continuous loss of focus on the only necessary, to the inexpressible groaning of the Spirit who cries out to God what is pleasing to him and what expresses in fullness the groaning of our nature, which we do not know how to formulate in words, not least because we do not even allow ourselves, overwhelmed by haste, the time to know ourselves, to know him, to invoke him. St. Augustine invites us to enter within ourselves because it is there that we can find the authentic meaning that not only expresses what we are, but cries out to the Father our need to be beloved children, repeating, “Abbá, Father:” “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas.”

He who loves his life will lose it – the Gospel according to John reminds us – and he who hates his life will find it. In this extreme phrase the Lord expresses our specificity as Christians, considered by the world as followers of a loser, a loser of life, who through death, and not through the building of an earthly kingdom, saved the world and redeemed each of us.

Pope Francis has taught us to take up the cry of violated life, to take it up and present it to the Father, but also to work to concretely alleviate the pain that arouses this cry, at any latitude and in the infinite ways in which evil weakens and destroys us.

Today the liturgy is animated and participated in by some of the Fathers and the sons and daughters of the Eastern Catholic Churches, who are present with us to witness the richness of their faith experience and the cry of their suffering, offered for the eternal repose of the late Pontiff.

To them we say thank you for agreeing to enrich the catholicity of the Church with the variety of their experiences, their cultures, but above all their very rich spirituality. Children of the beginnings of Christianity, they have carried in their hearts, together with their Orthodox brothers and sisters, the flavor of the Lord’s land, and some even continue to speak the language that Jesus Christ spoke.

Through the prodigious and painful developments of their history, they reached important dimensions and enriched the treasury of Christian theology with a contribution as original as it is, to a large extent, unknown by us Westerners.

In the past, Eastern Catholics have agreed to adhere to full communion with the successor of the apostle Peter whose body rests in this Basilica. And it was in the name of this union that they bore witness, often in blood or persecution, to their faith. In part now reduced, in numbers and in strength but not in faith, precisely by wars and intolerance, these brothers and sisters of ours remain firmly clinging to a sense of catholicity that does not exclude, but rather implies, the recognition of their specificity.

In the flow of history they were sometimes little understood by us Westerners, who, at certain times, judged them and decided what of what they, the descendants of apostles and martyrs, believed was or was not faithful to authentic theology (i.e., ours), while their Orthodox brethren, consanguineous and partakers of the same culture, liturgy and way of feeling God’s being and working, considered them runaways, lost to their own origin and assimilated into a world then deemed mutually incompatible.

Pope Francis, who taught us to love the diversity and richness of expression of all that is human, today I believe rejoices to see us together in prayer for him and for his intercession. And we once again commit ourselves, while many of them are forced to leave their ancient lands, which were the Holy Land, to save their lives and see a better world, to sensitize ourselves, as our Pope had wished, to welcome them and help them in our lands to preserve the specificity of their Christian contribution, which is an integral part of our being the Catholic Church.

It has always been dear to the eyes and hearts of our brothers and sisters of the East to cherish the incredible paradox of the Christian event: on the one hand the misery of our being sin, on the other the infinite mercy of God who has placed us beside his throne to share even his being, through what with the great Bishop and Doctor St. Athanasius, whom the Church remembers today, they call “divinization.”

Their liturgy is all interwoven with this amazement. And so, for example, in this liturgical season, the Byzantine tradition endlessly repeats this ineffable experience, saying, singing and communicating to others, “Christ rose from the dead, trampling death underfoot, and to the dead in the tombs he bestowed life.” And they constantly repeat it, as if to make it enter their own and others’ hearts.

This same awe is also expressed by the Armenian liturgy, in praying in the words of that St. Gregory of Narek whom Pope Francis himself wished to ascribe among the Doctors of the Church and whom tradition has made an integral part of the Eucharistic euchology: “We beseech you, Lord, may our sins be consumed by fire as those of the prophet were consumed by the burning coal offered to him with tongs, so that in all things your mercy may be proclaimed as the sweetness of the Father was proclaimed through the Son of God, who led the prodigal son back to his father’s inheritance and guided prostitutes to the blessedness of the righteous in the kingdom of heaven. Yea, I too am one of them: receive me like them also, as one in need of your great love for humanity, I who live by your graces.”

Here are just two examples of the vibrant force with which the emotion of the heart mixes in the East with the lucidity of the mind to describe our immense poverty saved by the infinity of God’s love.

Dear Brother Cardinals, as the days draw nearer and nearer when we will be called upon to choose the new Pope, let us place on our lips the invocation of the Holy Spirit that a great Eastern father, St. Simeon the New Theologian, wrote at the beginning of his hymns: “Come, true light; come, eternal life; come, hidden mystery; come, nameless treasure; come, ineffable reality; come, inconceivable person; come, endless happiness; come, light without setting; come, infallible expectation of all who are to be saved. Come, you who has longed and longs for my miserable soul. Come, thou, the one, to me, alone, for thou seest that I am alone; that seeing thee in eternity I, dead, may live; possessing thee, I, poor, may ever be rich and richer than kings; I, eating and drinking of thee, and clothing myself at all times with thee, pass from delight to delight to inexpressible goods, for thou art all good and all glory and all delight, and it is to thee that glory belongs, O holy, consubstantial, and life-giving Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (. ) now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

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

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