that gives us comfort and hope.
We need you, Mother,
because you are the Immaculate Conception.
Your person, the very fact that you exist
It reminds us that evil has neither the first nor the last word;
that our destiny is not death, but life,
It is not hatred but brotherhood, it is not conflict but harmony,
It is not war, but peace.
Looking at you, we feel confirmed in this faith
that events sometimes put to the test.
And you, Mother, turn your eyes of mercy
on all people oppressed by injustice and poverty,
tested by war: Mother, look at the tormented people of Ukraine,
to the Palestinian people and the Israeli people,
plunged back into the spiral of violence.
Today, Holy Mother, we bring here, under your gaze
to so many mothers who, like you, are in pain.
Mothers mourning their children killed by war and terrorism.
The mothers who see them leave on journeys of desperate hope.
And also the mothers who try to free them from the bonds of addiction,
and those who watch over them during a long and hard illness.
Today, Maria, we need you as a woman,
to entrust you to all the women who have suffered violence
and to those who are still victims of it,
in this city, in Italy and in all parts of the world.
You know them one by one, you know their faces.
Dry, we pray, their tears and those of their loved ones.
And help us make a path of education and purification,
recognizing and countering the violence that lurks
in our hearts and minds
and asking God to free us from it.
Show us again, oh Mother, the path of conversion,
because there is no peace without forgiveness
and there is no forgiveness without repentance.
The world changes if hearts change;
and each one must say: start with mine.
But only God can change the human heart
with his grace: the grace in which you, Mary,
You are immersed from the first moment.
The grace of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
whom you begot in the flesh,
who died and rose again for us, and that you always point out to us.
He is salvation, for every man and for the world.
Come, Lord Jesus!
Let your kingdom of love, justice and peace come to us.
Amen.