When Pope Francis He appeared The world on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica has humbly requested that the faithful “pray for me”. These simple words became the interpunction marks of his pontificate, because he practically completed all his speeches, greetings, weekly benefits and occasional conversations with the appeal.
Now, 12 years since March 13, 2013, and one month until the day he entered the hospital with life -threatening lung infections, the Roman Catholic world looks after his call and pray for his pope.
Even as the Vatican says that the pope’s condition saw “Slight improvement”, Every night, the Vatican Cardinals are running the Rosary Prayers for Francis’s recovery. The parishes around the world, from their native Argentina to the distant peoples, made a priority to visit and worship, maintain prayer sessions. Even Francis’ opponents in the hierarchy of the Church were prelated by demonstrations and fired and who waged war against the Pope’s vision – often about how to pray and worship – they quietly pronounce their prayers.
“At this point, even people from different ideological or theological preferences, prayer brings them together,” said Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, Secretary of the Vatican evangelization.
He said that Francis was a permanent appeal over the last ten years that people had been praying for him the expression of his humility, that “like any other person needs his prayer” and God’s help. It was also an expression of Francis’ confidence that people, often from other faiths, had the same line of communication with God as he did.
“It’s not a matter of selfishness,” the archbishop said. “It’s a matter of human solidarity.”
Prayer was the life of faith, the currency between earthly and spiritual empires, from the time of being negligent. For Francisco, the first Jesuit pope of the Church, he played a big role in a pastoral vision that attracts people near the Church, emphasizing the blessings and simple works of devotion over church rules and traditions.
He often taught that the openness of God’s will, the form of prayer, central in his decision, and preached that the Church that prayed together remained together.
Now, with breathing, it is devastated, and the body is still weak, Pope’s sick health has become an additional motivation for prayer that the Church believes to progress.
“I thank you from the heart for the prayers for my health from the square,” Francis said in a weak voice last week, on his only public address to his hospitalization on February 14th. “I follow you from here.” In recent days, he noticed and participated in a video link in spiritual exercises in the Vatican, where his unpleasant state turns into all conversations and rituals.
While Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, the archbishop of St. Peter’s Basilica, entered the Vatican on Tuesday night because of one of these meditations and prayer services for Francis, he said that prayer was “breath of soul” and that he and other church leaders were praying for all who were breathtaking for all breathtaking breathtaking. “
Cardinal Francis Arinze, former leader of the Boy Business Office under the Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, said prayer is the most important. In the Bible, he said, followers who prayed to Jesus “got what they asked.” He showed, he said, “we need God; we are not almighty. That is normal.”
Catholics agreed. At the church of San Zaccaria, Venice, the old woman held the rosary she said to have given her Francis. She said she involved him in her prayers. Her 90-year-old priest, Rev. Carlo Seno, he said that he prayed for Francisco every day, but that if the Pope did not recover, it would not mean that the prayer failed.
“God can intervene in a way that is different from what we hope,” Father Seno said.
Carol Zaleski, author, with her husband Philip Zaleski from “Prayer: History,“He said that there were many different types and styles of prayer – pleas and worship, unspoken and sung, related to sacrifice or ritual. What was clear was that prayer followed humanity from the beginning and that, at least, they returned to the drawings.
For the Catholic Church, she said, prayer, like a doctrine, was developing over the centuries. “Lex Oradi, Lex Credidi,” she said, remembering early Christian formulations that meant that prayer and belief were one and the same.
In the coming centuries, the wilderness in Egypt prayed fervently to survive hunger and elements. The Middle Ages Monastery became what it called “Prayer Laboratorys” in which “they work every kind of prayer.” In the 12th century, St. Dominik Guzmán, the founder of the Dominican Order, reported that the Virgin Mary had given him the beads of the Rosary to retain the figures of Hail Mary.
Prayer has taken on different forms, but the pleas for help or miracles really entered overdrive, she said, “When the enemy approaches and is about to release your city or when the plague kills everything.” When the disaster was prevented, prayer received merit.
After Pope Pius V led the league of Christian fighters in the prayer of the Rosary before triumphanting over a greater Turkish invasion at the Battle of Lepanto from 1571, a turning point in the history of Europe, the Church thanked the Virgin Mary, creating a holiday day.
The church still turned to prayer in front of the greatest challenges in the world.
In 2020, as death of a covid rose, Francis stood alone between a wooden cross that had rejected the plague from the 16th century and the empty Saint Peter Basilica Square to Offer persecution prayers For the healing of the world. Remembering those occasions, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi told Italian bishops this week that now the order in the world “is united in prayer for him.”
The call came to Vincenze de Simone, 69, from Naples, Italy, as she stood in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, reciting the prayer of Hail Mary.
“This is a historic moment,” she said, adding that the Pope’s illness was an additional motivation for Catholics to pray around the world for him.
Archbishop Nwachukwa said that fellowship was something that Jesus, who explicitly made a prayer of the pillar of faith, wanted to tell his followers that God was present wherever two or three people gathered to pray.
On Tuesday night, the Cardinals spilled from the Vatican after the day of spiritual exercises and prayers for Francisco, which he said that the Friar leading meditation should be hard work.
“After two hours,” said Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, a prefect of the church office for the Eastern Church, “we are exhausted.”
Among the prelates that have participated in the Francisco Prayer Services in recent weeks have been some of his most prominent critics, traditionalists Francis clashed for their employment of old rites and a way of praying to worry that too much distance between believers and church.
On the first night of the Rosary Prayer on St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Raymond Burke from the United States, who in the past suggested that the Pope was in danger of becoming a heretic, prayed quietly in the first place.
On Tuesday night, another prelate Francis persecuted from power, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, a former head of the church office at worship, left an evening prayer for Francisco. He worked his crown beads as he crossed St. Peter’s Square.
“I pray right now,” he said.
Emma Bubola contribute to reporting from Venice, and Elisabetta Zaledo from Rome.
