When Pope Francis appeared In the world on the Balcony of the Saint-Pierre Basilica, he humbly asked the faithful “pray for me”. These simple words have become the punctuation marks of his pontificate, because he ended practically all his speeches, greetings, weekly blessings and occasional conversations with the call.
Now, 12 years since his election on March 13, 2013, and a month when he entered the hospital with potentially fatal pulmonary infections, the Roman Catholic world takes into account his call and pray for his pope.
Even if the Vatican says that the state of the Pope has experienced a “slight improvement”, every evening, the vatican cardinals direct chain prayers for the recovery of Francis. The parishes of the whole world, from his native Argentina to the distant nations with which he has made it a priority to visit and worship, organize prayer sessions. Even Francis’ opponents in the church hierarchy, prelates, he downgraded and dismissed and who waged war on the vision of the Pope – often on how to pray and worship – silently say their prayers.
“Right now, even people of different ideological or theological inclinations, prayer brings them together,” said Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the Vatican office for evangelization.
He said that Francis’ constant attraction in the dozens of recent years so that people pray for him was the expression of his humility, that “like any other person, he needs prayer” and the help of God. It was also an expression of Francis’ confidence that people, often other confessions, had the same line of communication with God as Him.
“It is not a question of selfishness,” said the archbishop. “It is a question of human solidarity.”
Prayer has been the vital element of faith, the currency between terrestrial and spiritual kingdoms, since time immemorial. For Francis, the first Jesuit pope of the Church, he played a major role in a pastoral vision that brings people closer to the Church by emphasizing blessings and simple acts of devotion on the rules and traditions of the Church.
He often taught that an opening to the will of God, a form of prayer, is at the heart of his decision -making and preached that a church that prays together remains together.
Now, with his elaborate breathing and his still weak body, it is the Pope’s own health that has become an additional motivation for the prayer which he believes that the Church must prosper.
“Thank you from the bottom of your heart for your prayers for my health since the place,” said Francis in a weak voice last week, in his only public speech since his hospitalization on February 14. “I accompany you from here.” In recent days, he has observed and participated by a video link in spiritual exercises in the Vatican, where his tenuous condition is looming on all conversations and rituals.
As Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, the Archper of the Saint-Pierre Basilica, entered the Vatican on Tuesday evening for one of these meditations and prayer services for Francis, he said that prayer was “the breath of the soul” and that he and other church leaders, praying for the pope, prayed “for the breathing we all need”.
Cardinal Francis Arinze, a former chief of the church worship office under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, said the prayer was essential. In the Bible, he said, disciples who prayed Jesus “obtained what they asked for.” It has shown, he said, that “we need God; We are not all-powerful. It’s normal.
Basic Catholics agreed. In the church of San Zaccaria in Venice, an old woman held a rosary that she said that Francis had given her. She said that she had included it in her prayers. His 90 -year -old priest, Reverend Carlo Seno, said he had prayed for Francis every day, but that if the Pope does not recover, that would not mean that prayer had failed.
“God can intervene in a different way from what we hope,” said Father Seno.
Carol Zaleski, an author, with her husband, Philip Zaleski, of “Prayer: a story,“Says that there were many different types and styles of prayer – petitions and adorations, tacit and sung, linked to sacrifice or the ritual. What was clear was that prayer had accompanied humanity from the start and that the signs of it went up, at least, to cave the drawings.
For the Catholic Church, she said, prayer, like doctrine, had evolved over the centuries. “Lex Orandi, Lex Credndi,” she said, recalling an early Christian formulation which meant that prayer and belief were one and the same thing.
Over the following centuries, the monks hermit in Egypti required to survive hunger and elements. The monasteries of the Middle Ages have become what she called the “prayer laboratories” where “they make all kinds of prayers”. In the 12th century, Saint-Dominique de Guzmán, the founder of the Dominican order, reported that the Virgin Mary had given her rosaries to keep the account of Mary’s hail recitations.
Prayer has taken different forms, but the petitions to obtain help or miracles have really entered overmultiplied, it said: “When the enemy is approaching and about to dismiss your city, or when the plague kills everyone.” When the disaster was avoided, prayer obtained the credit.
After Pope Pius V led a league of Christian fighters by praying to the Rosary before triumphing over a greater Turkish invasion in the Battle of Lepero in 1571, a turning point in the history of Europe, the Church thanked the Virgin Mary by creating a day of celebration.
The church has always been transformed into prayer in the face of the greatest challenges in the world.
In 2020, when Covid’s deaths had jumped, Francis stood alone between a wooden cross used to keep a plague from the 16th century away and the empty square of the Saint-Pierre basilica to offer obsessive prayers for the healing of the world. Remembering this opportunity, Cardinal Matteo Zappi told Italian bishops this week that it was now the world of being “united in prayer for him”.
The call came to Vincenza de Simone, 69, from Naples, in Italy, when she was standing on Saint-Pierre square in Rome, reciting the prayer of MARIE MARIE.
“It’s a historic moment,” she said, adding that Pope’s disease was an additional motivation for Catholics around the world to pray for him.
Archbishop Nwachukwu said that the Assembly was something that Jesus, who expressly made prayer a pillar of faith, wanted when he told his disciples that God was present wherever two or three people gathered to pray.
Tuesday evening, the cardinals overflowed from the Vatican after a day of spiritual exercises and prayers for François who, according to a head of head, should be difficult work.
“After two hours,” said Cardinal Claudio GUGEROTTI, prefect of the church office for oriental churches, “we are exhausted.”
Among the prelates that have participated in Francis’ prayer services in recent weeks have been some of his most eminent criticisms, the traditionalists Francis clashed for their champion of old rites and ways of praying that he is worried about putting too much distance between the faithful and the Church.
The first night of the prayer of the rosary on the steps of the Saint-Pierre basilica, the cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States, who suggested in the past the Pope was in danger of becoming heretical, prayed quietly in the front row.
Tuesday evening, another prelate Francis exiled from power, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, a former chief of the church office on worship, left evening prayers for Francis. He worked his rosters crossing Place Saint-Pierre.
“I’m praying right now,” he said.
Emma Bubola contributed the reports of Venice, and Elisabetta POVOLEDO from Rome.
