In his Christmas greeting to the Roman Curia this morning, Pope Francis denounced the Israeli bombing of Gaza on Friday that killed several children and told Vatican officials to “Speak well of others” and “bless everyone.”
The pope described the “bombing of children” in Gaza yesterday as “cruelty…not war” and slammed the Israeli refusal to allow the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, into Gaza “as they had promised.” A source in Jerusalem told America that the Israeli army refused him entry.
He did so as he began his traditional pre-Christmas greeting and talk to the cardinals and senior officials of the Roman Curia on Dec. 21.
It was Francis’ 12th Christmas address to them since he became pope in 2013. He began by thanking Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the 90-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals, for his words of welcome and remarked, “He does not get old!” He recalled that the cardinal “spoke about war” and taking his cue from there, he went on to denounce the fact that “yesterday, children were bombed,” though the pope did not mention Israel by name. “This is cruelty. This is not war. I want to say this because it touches my heart.”
As Vatican media reported, the pope was referring to the fact that Israeli air strikes “killed at least 25 Palestinians, including seven children from the same family in Jabalia al-Nazla,” in northern Gaza. These deaths add to the at least 45,206 Palestinians that have been killed—among them more than 17,000 children—and 107,512 injured in Gaza since Israeli began its attacks on the territory, following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported at the end of October.
After his remarks on the war in Gaza, Pope Francis, who celebrated his 88th birthday four days ago, went on to focus his talk on another theme, that of not speaking badly about others.
He began by remarking that the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s civil service where some 3,000 people work, “is made up of many working communities, more or less complex or numerous” and said that when he reflected on what theme might benefit its “community life,” he opted for “an aspect that fits well with the mystery of the Incarnation.” Namely, “speak well of others and do not speak ill of them.”
He said, “It is something that concerns us all, even the pope, [and] the bishops, priests, consecrated persons, laypeople…because it touches our humanity.” He added, “this attitude, speaking well and not speaking badly, is an expression of humility, and humility is the essential feature of the Incarnation, in particular of the mystery of the Lord’s nativity, which we are preparing to celebrate.”
Pope Francis said, “An ecclesial community lives in joyful and fraternal harmony to the extent that its members walk the path of humility, renouncing thinking badly and speaking ill of others.”
He recalled that St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “Bless and do not curse” (Rom 12:14). Francis suggested his exhortation can be understood this way: “Speak well and do not speak evil” of others, and “in our case [in the Vatican],” this means “speak well and don’t speak badly of the people who work in the office with us, superiors, colleagues, everyone.”
He proposed that everyone “practice this way of humility” by “the practice of accusing ourselves,” as the ancient spiritual masters have taught. He recalled that one of those spiritual masters was Dorotheus of Gaza (505-565) a Christian monk who lived in Gaza, “that place that is now synonymous with death and destruction, but which is a very ancient city, where monasteries and luminous figures of saints and teachers flourished in the first centuries of Christianity.” He said St. Dorotheus “built up the church with instructions and letters” for evangelization and from him we too…can learn the humility to accuse ourselves so as not to speak ill of our neighbor.”
Self-accusation, Pope Francis said, “is the basis for our being able to say ‘no’ to individualism and ‘yes’ to the ecclesial spirit of community” in which “all are guardians of one another and walk together in humility and charity,” and “are gradually liberated from suspicion and distrust.”
He added, “those who exercise themselves in the virtue of accusing themselves, and practice it constantly, become free from suspicion and distrust and leave room for the action of God, the only one who creates the union of hearts. And so, if each one progresses on this path, a community can be born and grow in which all are one another’s guardians and walk together in humility and charity. When one sees a defect in a person, one can only talk about it with three people: with God, with the person himself and, if he cannot, with this person, with those in the community who can take care of him. And nothing more.”
Pope Francis told the cardinals and Roman Curia officials, “The humble heart is lowered like that of Jesus, whom we contemplate in these days in the Nativity scene.”
“In the face of the drama of humanity so often oppressed by evil,” he said, “The movement of the Most High is to lower himself, to make himself small, like a mustard seed, like a man’s seed in a woman’s womb. Invisible. Thus he begins to take upon himself the enormous, unbearable mass of the world’s sin.”
Man responds “to this movement of God” by “the accusation of himself,” he said. “This is what the Virgin Mary did, who had nothing to accuse herself of but allowed herself to be fully involved in the abasement of God, in the self-emptying of her Son, in the descent of the Holy Spirit.” In this sense, he said, humility could be called a theological virtue.
He said this “humility helps us to lower ourselves, to go to the sacrament of reconciliation.”
The Jesuit pope reminded the Vatican’s cardinals and officials that “theIncarnation of the Word shows us that God has not cursed us but has blessed us. Indeed, even more, it reveals to us that in God there is no curse, but only and always blessing.”
He recalled that St. Catherine of Siena once wrote: “It seems that he does not want to remember the offenses we do to him; and he does not want to condemn us eternally, but always to show mercy” (Letter No. 15).
Moreover, he said, St. Paul wrote: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heaven in Christ” (Eph 1:3).
“This is the foundation of our speaking-good,” the pope said. “We are blessed, and as such we can bless. We are blessed and therefore we canbless.”
He told the Roman Curia cardinals and officials, “We all need to be immersed in this mystery, otherwise we risk drying up.” He said, “office work here in the Curia is often arid and in the long run dries up if one does not recharge oneself with pastoral experiences, with moments of encounter, of friendly relationships, in gratuitousness.” He added, “And above all for this, we need to do the Spiritual Exercises every year: to immerse ourselves in God’s grace, to immerse ourselves totally. To allow ourselves to be ‘soaked’ by the Holy Spirit, by the life-giving water in which each of us is wanted and loved ‘from the beginning.’”
He told them, “If our heart is immersed in this original blessing, then we are capable of blessing everyone, even those who we dislike—it is a reality; to bless even the unpleasant—even those who have treated us badly. Bless.”
He pointed them to view “our Mother, the Virgin Mary” as “the model,” adding, “She, the blessed one, brought to the world the blessing that is Jesus.”
Mary is “the image and model of the church” that is “the sign and instrument of God’s blessing for humanity,” he said, and “in it we [in the Roman Curia] are all called to become artisans of blessing…teaching, living as artisans to bless.”
He told them, “We can imagine the church as a great river that branches off into thousands and thousands of streams, streams, rivulets—a bit like the Amazon basin—to irrigate the whole world with God’s blessing, which flows from Christ’s Paschal mystery.”
“In the mystery of the Incarnation,” he said, “God has blessed every man and woman who comes into this world, not with a decree handed down from on high, but through the flesh, through the flesh of Jesus, the blessed Lamb born of blessed Mary” (See St. Anselm, Disc. 52).
The pope said, “I like to think of the Roman Curia as a large workshop in which there are many different tasks, but everyone works for the same purpose: to bless, to spread the blessing of God and of Mother Church throughout the world.”
He concluded: “Dear friends, it is beautiful to think that with daily work, especially the most hidden work, each of us can contribute to bringing God’s blessing to the world. But in this we must be consistent: We cannot write blessings and then speak ill of the brother or sister, it ruins the blessing. Here then is the wish: that the Lord, born for us in humility, will help us to always be benevolent women and men.”
He ended by wishing them all a Merry Christmas, and giving them his blessing.
They stood and applauded. When the applause ended, he greeted each of them individually and gave them a Christmas gift of two books written by Dominican priests. The first, La grazia è un incontro. Se Dio ama gratis, perché i comandamenti?is a reflection on the importance of grace, a gift of God, and on the freedom of every Christian by Father Adrien Candiard, prior of his religious order’s house in Cairo and a member of the Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies. The second, La gloria deibuoni a nulla. Guida spirituale per accogliere l’imperfezioneconcerns the smallness of the human being immersed in the surprising choices of God. It is by Father Sylvain Detoc, who teaches at the Institut Catholique of Tolosa e all’Angelicum di Roma.
Immediately after he had finished shaking hands with each one, he went to the Paul VI Audience Hall to greet the employees of the Holy See and of the governatorate of the Vatican City-State and their families, which included many children. Here, too, he shook hands with, or blessed, many of them, and wished them the blessings and joy of Christmas.
