The Resurrection is a call to revive our faith, Pope Francis said in his Easter homily.
“To celebrate Easter is to believe once more that God constantly breaks into our personal histories, challenging our conventions, those fixed ways of thinking and acting that end up paralysing us,” he said.
The Easter Vigil Mass, held on a very rainy night, began in the atrium of St Peter’s Basilica with the blessing of the fire and of the Easter candle. With most of the lights in the basilica turned off, Pope Francis and the concelebrating cardinals, bishops and priests proceeded toward the altar, stopping first to light the Pope’s candle and then those of the concelebrants and faithful.
“We began this celebration outside, plunged in the darkness of the night and the cold,” the Pope said.
“We felt an oppressive silence at the death of the Lord, a silence with which each of us can identify, a silence that penetrates to the depths of the heart of every disciple, who stands wordless before the Cross.”
But, the Pope said, Jesus’s empty tomb should fill Christians with trust in God and should assure them that God’s light “can shine in the least expected and most hidden corners of our lives”.
Before giving his formal Easter blessing Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) in St Peter’s Square, the Pope prayed that Easter would bring “fruits of reconciliation”, hope, dialogue, peace, consolation, new life and wisdom. He made special mention of the “carnage” in Syria and recent violence along Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, which Francis said had not spared “the defenceless”.
Cardinal insists new Marian feast takes precedence
Celebration of the feast of Mary, Mother of the Church on May 21 should take precedence over any other possible liturgy that day, Cardinal Robert Sarah has said.
The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, led by Cardinal Sarah, had previously announced Pope Francis’s decision to add the feast to the Church’s calendar as an “obligatory memorial” on the Monday after Pentecost.
Although there are a few specific cases in which a priest could choose to celebrate a different Mass that day, Cardinal Sarah said in a note released last week that “all else being equal, the obligatory memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church is to be preferred”. The readings selected for the day “are to be held as proper because they illuminate the mystery of spiritual motherhood”.
In cases where a local or national Church calendar has another saint for May 21, Cardinal Sarah said: “Following the liturgical tradition of pre-eminence amongst persons, the memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary is to prevail.”
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