?At the General Audience dedicated to the Easter Triduum the Pope asks that everyone unite in condemnation of the terrorist attacks in Brussels – Cruel abominations

Pope Francis requested a collective
‘Hail Mary’ along with silent prayer “for the victims, for the injured, for the
families and for all the people of Belgium”, a day after the terrorist attacks
of Tuesday, 22 March. At the General Audience in St Peter’s Square the
following day, all the faithful present joined the Pontiff in witnessing
closeness to the population, the victims’ relatives and to all those who are
hospitalized due to the “cruel abominations that only cause death, dread or
horror”, as Francis defined such acts.

Addressing
a new “appeal to all people of good will to join in the unanimous condemnation”
of the events of the previous day, the Pope asked everyone to “to persevere in
prayer and in asking the Lord, in this Holy Week, to comfort suffering hearts
and to convert the hearts of these people blinded by cruel fundamentalism”. The
following is a translation of the Holy Father’s catechesis which he gave in
Italian.

Dear Bothers and Sisters,

Good morning,

Our reflection on the mercy of God
introduces us today to the Easter Triduum. We will live Holy Thursday, Good
Friday and Holy Saturday as powerful moments that allow us to enter ever
further into the great mystery of our faith: the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. Everything in these three days speaks of mercy, because it makes
visible how far the love of God can reach. We will listen to the account of the
final days of Jesus’ life. John the Evangelist offers us the key to
understanding its profound meaning: “having loved his own who were in the
world, he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1). The love of God has no bounds. As
St Augustine often repeated, it is a love that goes “to the end without end”.
God truly offers all of himself for each of us and holds nothing back. The
Mystery which we adore in this Holy Week is a great history of love which knows
no obstacles. The Passion of Jesus lasts until the end of the world, because it
is a story of sharing in the suffering of all humanity and a permanent presence
in the events of the private life of each of us. Indeed, the Easter Triduum is
the commemoration of a drama of love which gives us the certainty that we will
never be abandoned in life’s trials.

On
Holy Thursday Jesus institutes the Eucharist, anticipating in the Passover
banquet his sacrifice on Golgotha. In order to make the Apostles understand the
love which enlivens him he washes their feet, offering once again in the first
person the example of how they must act. The Eucharist is the love which
becomes service. It is the sublime presence of Christ who wishes to relieve
from hunger every man and woman, especially the weakest, to enable them to
undertake a journey of witnessing amid the difficulties of the world. Moreover,
in giving himself to us as food, Jesus attests that we must learn to share this
nourishment with others so that it may become a true communion of life with
those who are in need. He gives himself to us and asks us to dwell in him in
order to do likewise.

Good
Friday is the culminating moment of love. The death of Jesus, who on the Cross
surrenders himself to the Father in order to offer salvation to the entire
world, expresses the love given to the end, without end. A love which seeks to
embrace everyone, excluding no one. A love that extends to all times and all
places: an inexhaustible source of salvation to which each of us, sinners, can
draw. If God has shown us his supreme love in the death of Jesus, then we too,
regenerated by the Holy Spirit, can and must love one another.

Lastly,
Holy Saturday is the day of God’s silence. It must be a day of silence, and we
must do everything possible so that for us it may truly be a day of silence, as
it was in that time: the day of the silence of God. Jesus laid in the sepulchre
shares with all of humanity in the tragedy of death. It is a silence which
speaks and expresses love as solidarity with those who have always been
neglected, whom the Son of God reaches, filling the emptiness that only the
infinite mercy of God the Father can fill.

God
is silent, but out of love. On this day, love — that silent love — becomes the
expectation of life in the resurrection. Let us think about Holy Saturday: it
will do us good to consider the silence of Our Lady, “the Believer”, who
awaited the Resurrection in silence. Our Lady will be, for us, the icon of that
Holy Saturday. Think hard about how Our Lady lived that Holy Saturday; in
expectation. It is love that has no doubt, but which hopes in the word of the
Lord, that it may be made manifest and resplendent on the day of Easter.

It
is all a great mystery of love and mercy. Our words are poor and insufficient
to express it fully. We may find helpful the experience of a young woman, not
very well known, who wrote sublime pages about the love of Christ. Her name was
Julian of Norwich. She was illiterate, this girl who had visions of the passion
of Jesus and who then, after becoming a recluse, described, with simple but
deep and intense language, the meaning of merciful love. She said: “Then our
good Lord asked me: ‘Are you glad that I suffered for you?’. I answered him:
‘Yes, good Lord, and I am most grateful to you; yes, good Lord, may You be
blessed’. Then Jesus, our good Lord, said: ‘If you are glad, so too am I.
Having suffered the passion for you is for me joy, happiness, eternal bliss;
and if I could suffer more I would’”. This is our Jesus, who says to each of
us: “If I could suffer more for you, I would”.

How
beautiful these words are! They allow us to truly understand the immense and
boundless love that the Lord has for each one of us. Let us allow ourselves to
be wrapped in this mercy which comes to meet us; and in these days, while we
keep our gaze fixed on the passion and death of the Lord, let us receive in our
heart his boundless love and, like Our Lady on Saturday, in silence, await the
Resurrection.