Easter gives hope in our darkest hour

Turin Shroud to boost hope

VATICAN CITY, April 12, (AP): Easter offers a message of hope in people’s “darkest hour,” Pope Francis said, as he celebrated a late-night vigil Mass Saturday in St. Peter’s Basilica, with the public barred because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pontiff in his homily likened the fears of current times to those experienced by Jesus’ followers the day after his crucifixion. “They, like us, had before their eyes the drama of suffering, of an unexpected tragedy that happened all too suddenly,’’ Francis said. ”They had seen death and it weighed on their hearts. Pain was mixed with fear” about their own lives. “Then, too, there was fear about the future and all that would need to be rebuilt.”

Francis added: “For them, as for us, it was the darkest hour.”

Easter vigil Mass in the basilica is among the Vatican’s more evocative ceremonies. Celebrants enter in darkness, except for candlelight. The pontiff holds a tall Easter candle, which is lit for him. Then the basilica’s lights are turned on, in a sign of joy. But this night, when the basilica was illuminated, all its emptiness was painfully visible, and the footsteps of the pope and his small entourage on the marble floor could clearly be heard as they walked in slow procession toward the altar.

Francis encouraged faithful to sow “seeds of hope, with small gestures of care, affection of prayer.”

“Tonight we acquire a fundamental right that can never be taken away from us: the right to hope,’’ Francis said.

Still, he acknowledged the difficulty of obtaining optimism, saying “as the days go by and fears grow, even the boldest hope can dissipate.”

Describing the Easter message as a “message of hope,’’ Francis urged Christians to be ”messengers of life in a time of death.”

Fr Cantalamessa

Tradition

During Easter vigil Mass, adults converting to Catholicism are baptized by the pope, but the pandemic containment measures forced elimination of that tradition during the ceremony.

Earlier on Holy Saturday, the Turin Shroud, a burial cloth some believe covered Jesus, and which was associated with a 16th-century plague, was put on special view in a chapel in that northern city, through video streaming to inspire hope during the coronavirus outbreak.

Francis hailed the initiative by the Turin archbishop, saying making it visible meets the requests of the faithful who are suffering through the COVID-19 outbreak. The cloth belongs to the Vatican, which has allowed its scientific testing.

As a TV camera showed the 14-foot-long (fourmeter-long) cloth in its showcase, Nosiglia opened prayers, noting Holy Saturday marks the wait for Easter, when Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead. He said people today “await to be liberated from the pandemic” causing so many deaths, and said the shroud “opens hearts to faith and hope.”

The archbishop read aloud a letter from Francis, in which the pontiff expressed appreciation for “this gesture, which meets the request of the faithful people of God, so harshly proved by the coronavirus pandemic.”

Francis also wrote that “in the face of the man of the shroud, we see also the faces of so many ill brothers and sisters, especially those more alone, and those less cared for, but also all the victims of wars and violence, of slavery and of persecution.”

Nosiglia then pressed one of his hands against the glass case and prayed before the cloth.

Hours later, Saturday night at the Vatican, Francis was scheduled to lead an Easter vigil Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, without the rank-and-file as part of coronavirus containment measures.

As Francis listened attentively, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa told a few prelates, choir members and about a score of other faithful that “it took merely the smallest and most formless element of nature, a virus, to remind us that we are mortal” and that “military power and technology are not sufficient to save us.”