In his homily, the pope cited the need for people to face problems with patience, keeping faith and meditating.
Pope Francis criticized sexist violence today, said that hurting women is an outrage against God and called for more promotion and protection of women in today’s societies, at the first mass of 2022.
“How much violence is against women. Enough. To hurt a woman is to outrage God, who took the humanity of a woman,” Francis said in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.
The pope presided over this mass on January 1, while yesterday, December 31, he attended the end of the year, seated in a chair to the right of the basilica, and got up only to deliver the homily.
This Saturday, the pope spoke of women and mothers, and said that they have an “inclusive look, which overcomes tensions by preserving and meditating on the heart.”
“It is the look with which many mothers embrace the situations of their children. It is a concrete look, which does not get discouraged, which does not paralyze before problems, but rather places them on a broader horizon,” he added.
He recalled that mothers “assist a sick or difficult child” and stressed the love in their eyes, “that, while they cry, they know how to communicate reasons to continue waiting.”
Mothers, he continued, “know how to hold the threads of life together” and that is why they are essential in today’s world, because they are “capable of weaving threads of communion, which counteract the barbed wires of divisions, which are too many.”
He also praised that “they do not look at the world to exploit it, but to make it have life” and “they manage to keep dreams and concrete together, avoiding deviations from aseptic pragmatism and abstraction.”
In his homily, the pope cited the need for people to face problems with patience, keeping faith and meditating.
Sometimes, he admitted, “we hope that everything will work out, but suddenly an unexpected problem strikes, like a bolt out of nowhere. And it creates a painful conflict between expectations and reality. It also happens with faith, when the joy of the Gospel is put to the test by a difficult situation that we have to go through ”.
This difficulty, he argued, is part of the path to “the goal, the cross without which one cannot be resurrected.”
On this first day of the year, the Catholic Church commemorates the World Day of Peace, which this edition is dedicated to “dialogue between generations, education and work.”
After mass, the pope leaned out of the window of the Vatican Apostolic Palace to pray the Angelus with the faithful in the square and ask for peace in the world: “Peace is needed. I have been watching images on a television program, of war, of misery. This is happening in the world today. We want peace. “
Moments before the prayer, he stressed that peace is built with attention to others, justice and forgiveness.
He also recognized that the world is living “still uncertain and difficult times due to the pandemic” and that “there are many who are afraid of the future and burdened by social situations, personal problems, the dangers that come from the ecological crisis, of injustices and planetary economic imbalances “.
Finally, he wanted to remember “young mothers and their children who flee from wars and famines or who wait in refugee camps.” (I)
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