Catholics worldwide have spent the last week or so seriously concerned for Pope Francis’ health. We’ve attended special Masses, prayed the rosary and kept him close in our silent prayers.
Locally, the Archdiocese of Louisville quickly organized a Mass of Healing for the Holy Father. It drew about 100 people to prayer at Holy Family Church Feb. 25, when the pope’s condition was reported as critical but stable.
The liturgy was warm and hopeful, suffused with a sense of prayerful love poured out for Pope Francis.
During his homily, Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre highlighted the challenge inherent in prayer — when we express our desires, but also commit to accepting God’s will.
“As we pray for the pope’s healing, we make those words of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane our own — hear our prayers, our loving Father, but thy will be done,” he said. “We ask, and we beg, that Pope Francis will be healed and continue his ministry, but we place our faith in Jesus Christ.”
Of course, when someone we love is suffering, we can think only of their healing. But we are people who believe in eternal life. And we don’t look to that future with trepidation, but with hope.
Pope Francis reflected on this theme in a text he prepared weeks ago for his regularly scheduled general audience on Feb. 26. The audience was canceled, but the Vatican released his prepared text that day.
In the text, Pope Francis reflects on Jesus’ presentation at the Temple. Simeon, an elderly man of deep faith, perceives Christ’s presence, Pope Francis wrote, noting, “he sees the light that shines in the midst of the peoples plunged ‘in darkness.’ ”
Simeon “is a witness of faith received as a gift and communicated to others; he is a witness of the hope that does not disappoint; he is a witness of God’s love, which fills the heart of man with joy and peace,” Pope Francis wrote.
“Filled with this spiritual consolation, the elderly Simeon sees death not as the end, but as fulfillment, fullness; he awaits it like a ‘sister’ that does not annihilate but introduces to the true life that he has already foretasted and in which he believes,” he wrote.
Pope Francis often speaks of hope, a hope that does not disappoint, that’s rooted in God’s love. For his Lenten message, he calls us to journey together in hope toward Easter. Hope is also the theme of the Jubilee Year 2025. Pope Francis calls us all to join him in being “pilgrims of hope” for the jubilee.
When the Holy Father — indeed each of us — embarks on the final pilgrimage, whenever that is, may he be accompanied by our prayers and, like Simeon, journey with hope, seeing death not as the end but as fulfillment.
MARNIE McALLISTER
Editor
