Homily of Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti at the Mass of the Seventh Day of the novelty

Editor’s note: On May 2, 2025, Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti delivered the following homily during the seventh day of novel masses by Pope Francis. The following text is a translation by ACI Press of the Original in Italianan Posted by the Vatican.

Next, the complete homily:

Blessed, venerated cardinal parents, brothers and sisters, a few days ago we have prayed about the body of our Holy Father Francisco and on that body we have proclaimed our unwavering faith in the resurrection of the dead. These days our certainty continues and our invocation so that the Lord looks at his faithful servant with mercy.

The resurrection, in fact, as the first reading reminds us, is not an intrinsic phenomenon to human nature. It is God who resurrects us, through his spirit. From the waters of baptism we come out as new creatures, members of the family of God, their intimate or, as Saint Paul says, adoptive children and no more slaves. And it is precisely because we are children in the same spirit that we are allowed to shout our invocation: “Abba, Father.” All creation binds to this cry, waiting for its healing in childbirth pains. Creation and the human person seem to have such little value today. However, among us there are cardinals, such as those in Africa, who feel spontaneously the beauty of the fruit of these labor pains, because a new life is an invaluable value for their people.

The issue of creation as a travel companion of humanity and solidarity with it arises, as well as asks for solidarity to the human race, so that it is respected and healed. This is an issue that was very dear to our Pope Francis.

Around us we do nothing but perceive the cry of creation and in this one that is destined for glory and is the purpose for which creation was loved: the human person. The earth shouts, but above all he shouts a humanity overwhelmed by hate, which in turn is the result of a deep devaluation of the value of life that, as we have heard, for us Christians is participation in the family of God, until the concorporeity and consanguinity with Christ Lord, whom we celebrate in this sacrament of the Eucharist.

Very often this desperate humanity has a hard time expressing his prayer and his invocation to the God of life. And it is then, it reminds us of Saint Paul, that the Spirit intervenes in us and makes our rocky silences and our inexpressed tears an invocation to our God with unspeakable groans or, as it can also be translated, with inexpressed groans, that is, silent. It is such a beloved expression in the oriental Christian world, that it sees in the inability to express to God (apophasis) one of the characteristics of theology: contemplation of the incomprehensible, vain attempt to remove the veil of supreme truth and, therefore, a maximum, the possibility of saying, as Saint Thomas of Aquinas would repeat in the West, not what God is, but what is not.

Here is a great lesson for us that we often feel owners of God, perfect knowledgeable of truth, while we are only pilgrims to whom we have given the Word, which is the Son of God incarnate, because what has given us the gift of living in the glory of God is only the result of grace and that infusion of the Holy Spirit that makes us, precisely “spiritual.” And in the East, the spiritual father and mother are the monk, the nun or in any case the guide of who seeks God. We also westernly, long before calling these “spiritual directors” people, we call them spiritual fathers and mothers. An interesting change.

In this Eucharist we intend to unite as we can and know, despite our aridity, our distractions and our constant loss of focus on the only necessary, to the ineffable groan of the spirit that cries out to God for what he pleases and for what he fully expresses the groan of our nature, that we do not know how To invoke it. San Agustín invites us to enter our interior because it is there where we can find the authentic sense that not only expresses what we are, but also cries out our need to be loved children, repeating: “Abbá, father”: Do not go outside, you return to yourself; In the inner man habitat truth.

He who loves his life will lose it – the Gospel remembers us according to John -; And he who hates his life will find it. In this extreme phrase, the Lord expresses our specificity of Christians, considered by the world as followers of a loser, a loser of life, who through death, and not through the construction of an earthly kingdom, saved the world and redeemed each of us.

Pope Francis has taught us to collect the cry of raped life, to assume it and present it to the father, but also to work to specifically relieve the pain that this cry provokes, in any latitude and in the infinite ways in which evil weakens and destroys us.

Today the liturgy is animated and participated by some parents and children of the Eastern Catholic churches, present with us to testify the wealth of their experience of faith and the cry of their suffering, offered by the eternal rest of the deceased pontiff.

We thank you to have agreed to enrich the catholicity of the Church with the variety of their experiences, their cultures, but above all of their very rich spirituality. Children of the beginnings of Christianity, have led in their hearts, along with their Orthodox brothers and sisters, the taste of the land of the Lord, and some even continue speaking the language that Jesus Christ spoke.

Through the prodigious and painful developments in their history, they reached important dimensions and enriched the treasure of Christian theology with a contribution as original as, in large part, unknown to us, western.

In the past, Eastern Catholics have agreed to join in full communion with the successor of the apostle Peter, whose body rests in this basilica. And it is in the name of this union that they have testified, often with blood or persecution, their faith. Now partly reduced in number and strength, but not in faith, precisely by wars and intolerance, these brothers and sisters remain firmly attached to a sense of catholicity that does not exclude, but implies, the recognition of their specificity.

Throughout history, western ones were badly understood by us, which in some times we judged them and decided what of what they believed, descendants of apostles and martyrs, was or not faithful to the authentic theology (that is, ours), while their orthodox brothers, blood relatives and participants of the same culture, liturgy and way of feeling the being and way of feeling the being of God. from home, lost in their origins and assimilated to a world considered mutually incompatible.

Pope Francis, who taught us to love the diversity and richness of the expression of everything human, today I think he is glad to see us together in prayer for him and for his intercession. And we commit ourselves once again, while many of them are forced to leave their old lands, which were Holy Land, to save their lives and see a better world, to sensitize us, as our Pope wanted, to welcome them and help them in our lands to preserve the specificity of their Christian contribution, which is an integral part of our Catholic Church.

In the eyes and heart of our brothers and sisters of the East, it has always been wanted to keep the incredible paradox of the Christian event: on the one hand the misery of our being sinners, on the other the infinite mercy of God who has put us next to his throne to also share his being, through what, with the great Bishop and Doctor San Atanasio, whom the Church remembers today, defines “divinization”.

All its liturgy is interwoven with this wonder. And thus, for example, in this liturgical time, the Byzantine tradition incessantly repeats this ineffable experience, saying, singing and communicating to others: “Christ has risen among the dead, trampling death with death and the dead in the graves has given them their lives.” And they constantly repeat it, as if to enter their own hearts and those of others.

This same amazement is also expressed in the Armenian liturgy, when praying with the words of that San Gregorio de Narek, whom Pope Francis himself wanted to include among the doctors of the Church and who tradition has incorporated into the Eucharist: «We beg you, Lord, that our sins are consumed by the fire as those of the prophet were consumed by the burning coal that was offered with tenades. Mercy as announced the sweetness of the Father through the Son of God, who guided the prodigal son to return to the inheritance of his father and guide prostitutes to the bliss of the righteous in the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I am also one of them: Receive as I am, as someone in need of your great love for humanity, I live for your graces ».

Here only two examples of the vibrant force with which the emotion of the heart is mixed in the East with the clarity of the mind to describe our immense poverty saved by the infinity of God’s love.

Dear Cardinal Brothers, as the days in which we will be called to choose the new Pope, we put on our lips the invocation to the Holy Spirit that a great Eastern Father, San Simeón, the new theologian, wrote at the beginning of his hymns: «Come, true light; come, eternal life; Come, hidden mystery; Come, unnameable treasure; come, ineffable reality; Come, inconceivable person; Come, endless happiness; Come, light without sunset; Come, infallible expectation of all who must be saved. Come, you whom my miserable soul has wanted and wants. Come, you, the only one, to me, alone, because you see that I am alone; so that, seeing you forever, I, dead, can live; possessing you, I, poor, can always be rich and richer than the kings; I who, eating and drinking from you and dressing from you to each moment, step of delight in delight in the ineffable goods, because you are all good, all glory and everything delight, and it is you to whom the glory belongs, oh holy, consubstantial and vivifier Trinidad, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (…) Now and always and for the centuries of the centuries. Amen”.