On the day after he was discharged from the hospital, Pope Francis, in surprisingly good form, opened Holy Week in the Vatican by presiding at the Palm Sunday celebration and delivering the homily.
Francis, who had been hospitalized for three days suffering from bronchitis, arrived in a white jeep at the obelisk in the center of St Peter’s Square at 10 a.m. on Sunday, April 2. The sky was cloudy, it was about 55 degrees, and the pope was dressed in a white overcoat to protect him from the cool temperature.
Forty cardinals and 30 bishops wearing red vestments and white miters, as well as many young people holding palm branches, were already gathered at the obelisk when the pope arrived. Tens of thousands of people and 300 priests, also holding palm branches, were present in the square and waved the branches at the appearance of the pope.
Pope Francis frequently made additions to his prepared text, speaking off the cuff, a further indication that he was back to his normal self.
When he got out of the jeep, Francis put on a red stole over the overcoat before he blessed the palms. He stood as the Gospel recounting Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem was read. Afterward the cardinals, bishops and young people processed to the altar on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica and the pope, carrying a palm branch, followed in the jeep and went to take his place in front of the altar that was, as usual, covered by a canopy.
At the altar, he sat throughout the singing in Italian of the Gospel account according to St. Matthew of the passion and death of Jesus, and then delivered his homily in a normal voice that betrayed no sign of the bronchitis of previous days. He frequently made additions to his prepared text, speaking off the cuff, a further indication that he was back to his normal self.
He centered his meditation on the sense of abandonment that Jesus felt on the cross when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46) and linked his cry to the cries of abandonment experienced by so many people—other Christs—in today’s world.
He centered his meditation on the sense of abandonment that Jesus felt on the cross when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
That cry of Jesus, he said, “brings us to the very heart of Christ’s passion, the culmination of the sufferings he endured for our salvation.” Francis recalled “the sufferings of the body” that Jesus experienced—the beating, flogging and crucifixion—and also “the sufferings of the soul,” including the betrayal of Judas and denials of Peter. But, he said, “the suffering of the spirit” was “the most searing of all sufferings,” because Jesus experienced “abandonment by God.”
He said, “We find it hard even to grasp what great suffering he embraced out of love for us. He sees the gates of heaven close, he finds himself at the bitter edge, the shipwreck of life, the collapse of certainty. And he cries out: ‘Why?’”
Francis said this “why” embraces every other “why” ever spoken by men and women through history.
The pope also recalled that in the Bible the word forsake is heard “at moments of extreme pain: love that fails, or is rejected or betrayed; children who are rejected and aborted; situations of repudiation, the lot of widows and orphans; broken marriages, forms of social exclusion, injustice and oppression; the solitude of sickness. In a word, in the drastic severing of the bonds that unite us to others.”
He said, “Christ brought all of this to the cross; upon his shoulders, he bore the sins of the world” at the very moment when he experienced “the distance of God.” Francis said Jesus did all this “for us. He became one of us to the very end, in order to be completely and definitively one with us. So that none of us would ever again feel alone and beyond hope. He experienced abandonment in order not to leave us prey to despair, in order to stay at our side forever.”
He recalled that even as he felt utter abandonment on the cross, “Jesus refused to yield to despair. Instead, he prayed and trusted” and “commended himself into the hands of the Father…. Even more: at the hour of abandonment, he continued to love his disciples who had fled, leaving him alone, and he forgave those who crucified him.”
“Dear brother, dear sister,” the pope said, “Jesus did this for me, for you, because whenever you or I or anyone else seems pinned to the wall, lost in a blind alley, plunged into the abyss of abandonment, sucked into a whirlwind of ‘whys,’ there can still be hope. It is not the end, because Jesus was there and even now, he is at your side.”
Then, applying the Gospel message to today’s world, he said, “Christ, in his abandonment, stirs us to seek him and to love him and those who are themselves abandoned. For in them we see not only people in need, but Jesus himself, abandoned.”
He told both the 60,000 Romans and pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square and Christians worldwide, “[Jesus] wants us to care for our brothers and sisters who resemble him most, those experiencing extreme suffering and solitude.” He said, “Today there are many abandoned Christs, their numbers are legion.”
He mentioned some of them: “Entire peoples are exploited and abandoned; the poor live on our streets and we look the other way; migrants are no longer faces but numbers; prisoners are disowned; people written off as problems. Countless other abandoned persons are in our midst, invisible, hidden, discarded with white gloves: unborn children, the elderly who live alone (could be your father or mother or grandfather or grandmother), the sick whom no one visits, the disabled who are ignored, and the young burdened by great interior emptiness, with no one prepared to listen to their cry of pain, and they find not other road except suicide. The abandoned ones of today. The Christs of today.”
Pope Francis: “Jesus, in his abandonment, asks us to open our eyes and hearts to all who find themselves abandoned.”
Then, departing from his prepared text, he recalled that a homeless man, a German, had died “alone and abandoned” under the colonnades of St. Peter’s two weeks ago. “He was Jesus for us,” the pope said. “Many people need our closeness, many are abandoned. I too need Jesus to caress me, and come close to me, and for this reason I go to find him in those who are abandoned and alone.”
The pope said, “Jesus, in his abandonment, asks us to open our eyes and hearts to all who find themselves abandoned. For us, as disciples of the ‘forsaken’ Lord, no man, woman or child can be regarded as an outcast, no one left to himself or herself. Let us remember that the rejected and the excluded are living icons of Christ.”
He concluded his homily telling believers: “Today, let us implore this grace: to love Jesus in his abandonment and to love Jesus in the abandoned all around us.”
Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, the vice-dean of the College of Cardinals, celebrated at the altar while the pope sat in a chair at the side.
At the end of the celebration, Pope Francis thanked all those across the world who had accompanied him with their prayers during his hospitalization. He also called on people to pray especially during Holy Week for “the battered people of Ukraine,” and he invited everyone to live this week “accompanying the Lord Jesus with faith and love.” He got into a wheelchair to greet all the cardinals individually, and then went back on the jeep to ride among the crowd in the square.
[Read next: “Pope Francis’ hospitalization actually gave me hope for the Catholic Church”]
