Pope Leo XIV assured that no cry of the innocent victims of violence will be heard by God, in his speech to the participants of the Catholic and Orthodox pilgrimage who arrived in Rome from the United States, his native country.
The pilgrimage From Rome to New Rome It is composed of 50 Greek orthodox pilgrims, Byzantine Catholics and Latin Catholics from the United States. It is directed by the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Elidoporos de América and by Cardinal Joseph Tobin, Newark Archbishop, according to Vatican News.
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In his speech In the Vatican, Pope León stressed that in the calendars of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church, this year the Easter of Resurrection was held at the same time, an incentive for the life of Christians.
The resurrection of Christ, highlighted the Holy Father, “inspires us a great hope, because we know that no cry of innocent victims of violence, no lament of mothers who cry their children will remain without being heard.”
“Our hope is in God, and precisely because we constantly drink from the inexhaustible source of his grace, we are called to be witnesses and carriers of her,” added the pontiff.
After remembering the presence of the Patriarch Orthodox Bartolomé at the opening mass of his pontificate, Leo XIV expressed his desire to “be able to meet again in a few months to participate in the ecumenical commemoration of the anniversary of the Council of Nicea”, which this 2025 turns 1,700 years.
The unity of believers
When talking about the path of unity and after highlighting “theological progress and dialogue in the charity that have characterized the last decades”, Leo XIV recalled the historic meeting between San Pablo VI and the patriarch Athenacoras, who signed a statement in which the mutual sentences of excommunication were raised after the schism of 1054 and stressed that a pilgrimage, like that now, It wouldn’t even have been possible. ”
“The work of the Holy Spirit has created in hearts the availability to take those steps, as a prophetic omen of the full and visible unity. We also, on our part, must continue to implore the paration, the consolation, the grace to travel the path of unity and fraternal charity,” the Pope continued.
“The unity among believers in Christ is one of the signs of the divine gift of consolation; the writing promises that ‘in Jerusalem they will be comforted,” he said.
In that sense, Pope Leo XIV stressed that “spiritually, we all need to return to Jerusalem, the city of La Paz, where Peter, Andrés and all the apostles, after the days of the passion and resurrection of the Lord, received the Holy Spirit in Pentecost, and from there they gave testimony of Christ to the confines of the earth.”
To conclude, Pope Leon made votes to “that the return to the roots of our faith makes us experience all the gift of the consolation of God and make us capable, such as the good Samaritan, to spill on the humanity of today the oil of the consolation and the wine of joy.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.