Pope Francis set aside the text he had prepared for a meeting with young Filipinos after a 12-year-old girl asked him a tearful question about why God allows suffering.
“Certain realities in life can only be seen through eyes cleansed by tears,” the Pope said after listening to Glyzelle Palomar, who used to live on the streets but now has a home thanks to the foundation for street children Pope Francis had visited in Manila yesterday.
Palomar spoke after Jun Chura — a 14-year-old rescued from the streets by the same foundation — described life on the streets as a struggle to find enough to eat, to fight the temptation of drug use and glue sniffing, and to avoid adults looking for the young to exploit and abuse.
Covering her face with her hand as she wept in front of the microphone, Palomar asked the Pope: “Why did God let this happen to us?”
As some 30,000 young people looked on at the University of Santo Tomas, the Pope kissed the top of Palomar’s head and pulled her close for a big hug, then embraced her and Chura together.
He also listened to the testimony of two other young men and their questions: how do young people discover God’s will for them? What is love? And how can young people become agents of mercy and compassion?
The Pope’s gathering with the youths was emotional from the beginning. Opening the encounter, the Pope spoke about 27-year-old Kristel Padasas, an employee of the US bishops’ Catholic Relief Services, who died after being struck by speaker stand knocked down by the wind on Saturday at the pope’s Mass in Tacloban.
She was “young, like yourselves”, the Pope told the youths, asking them to join him in praying for her and for her parents. “She was the only daughter. Her mother is coming from Hong Kong [and] her father has come to Manila to wait,” he told them.
Although he had received the texts of the young people’s testimonies and questions in advance, and had prepared a response, he set them aside and asked Mgr Mark Miles from the Vatican Secretariat of State to translate as he spoke off the cuff in Spanish.
One of the first things he commented on was the fact that Palomar was the only female on the programme.
“Sometimes we’re too ‘machista’ and don’t allow room for the woman,” he said. “But the woman is able to see things with a different eye than men. Women are able to pose questions that we men are not able to understand.
“Pay attention,” the Pope told the young people. Palomar was “the only one who posed a question for which there is no answer. And she wasn’t able to express it in words but tears.”
“When the next pope comes to Manila,” he told them, include “more women” on the programme.
Speaking directly to Palomar, he told her, “you have expressed yourself so bravely”.
While it is impossible to explain why God would allow children to suffer, he told the young people, “only when we, too, can cry” can one approach a response.
“I invite each one of you here to ask yourself: ‘Have I learned to weep and cry when I see a child cast aside, when I see someone with a drug problem, when I see someone who has suffered abuse?”
Being moved to tears out of compassion and in the face of the mystery of suffering is holy, he said. It is not the same thing as crying to manipulate or get something from someone.
“Jesus in the Gospel cried, he cried for his dead friend,” Lazarus, “he cried in his heart for the family that had lost its child, he cried in his heart when he saw the old widow having to bury her son, he was moved to tears of compassion when he saw the multitude of crowds without a pastor,” Pope Francis said.
“If you don’t learn how to cry you cannot be good Christians.”
In the face of suffering like Palomar’s and Chura’s, he said, “our response must either be silence or the word that is born of our tears”.
“Be courageous, do not be afraid to cry,” the Pope said.
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