Via Crucis: Pope asked immigrants and hungry | Chronic

Francisco asked on Friday for immigrants, the "hungry for bread and love" and for the Earth, listing a series of "crosses in the world" during the celebration of the Stations of the Cross in front of the Roman Colosseum.

"Help us to see on your cross all the crosses of the world"said the Pope during the celebration of the traditional Good Friday ceremony, his seventh as pontiff, and before enumerating a series of situations he asked for.

In their requests, the pontiff included "people hungry for bread and love"; a "people alone and abandoned even by their own children and parents"and (people) "thirsty for justice and peace."

One of the axes of his pontificate was present and he also asked "Immigrants who find their doors closed because of fear and heart shielded by political calculations".

After asking "The Church that feels continually badaulted from within and from outside", the pontiff expressed his environmental concern and asked "our common house that is bursting seriously before our selfish and blind eyes for greed and power".

In addition, in what appeared to be an implicit reference to the crisis of abuse that is currently going through the Church, she asked "the little wounded in their innocence and purity".

In a year in which the Vatican took the inclusion of women as axis, the meditations for Via Crucis were written by an Italian nun, Eugenia Bonetti, which focused on the denunciation of human trafficking and the particular condemnation of prostitution.

"Let us think of children from different parts of the world who can not go to school and who, on the contrary, are exploited in mines, fields, fishing, sold and bought by meat merchants, for transplantation. bodies, abused and exploited on our streets by many, including Christians, who have lost their sense of their sacredness and that of others ", he said in this line of the sixth of the 14 stations in which the celebration was divided.

"As a tiny corpse, found a night in Rome, in front of which men in luxury cars were lining up to enjoy", denounced the text later.

Bergoglio had arrived at the Colosseum just after the 16 hours of Argentina (the 21st of Rome), where he had been received by the mayor of the city, Virginia Raggi, and a crowd of more than 20,000 people.

The surrounding streets were empty since the beginning of the afternoon, when the subway stations were closed and a security ring was placed on a kilometer side of the symbol historic Rome.

In this context, Francisco remains serious and thoughtful and follows the act from a box placed at the foot of Palatine Hill, in front of the Flavio amphitheater, until he delivers his speech almost two hours after his arrival.

Francisco had begun on Good Friday in the basilica of San Pedro where, prostrated for two minutes in silence on the ground, he took the first step for the so-called "celebration of the Lord", characterized by the fact that the pope does not preach but limit to listen to the homily of the preacher of the Pontifical House, Raniero Cantalamessa, an 84-year-old Capuchin who also guides him in his annual spiritual exercises.

Cantalamessa affirmed in his homily that "the Church has been mandated by its founder to stand on the side of the poor and the weak, to be the voice of those who do not have a voice." and, thank God, that's what she does above all else in her supreme pastor. "