The Pope specified that “friendship is not the result of calculation, nor of coercion: it arises spontaneously when we recognize something of ourselves in the other. And, if it is true, friendship is so strong that it does not fail even in the face of betrayal.”
“A true friend does not abandon you, even when you make mistakes: he corrects you, perhaps scolds you, but he forgives you and does not abandon you,” he indicated.
Then the Holy Father highlighted that “today Jesus, in the Gospel, tells us that we are precisely that for Him, friends: people loved beyond all merit and all expectations, to whom He extends His hand and offers His love, His Grace. , his Word; with whom he—with us, friends—he shares what is most dear to him, everything he has heard from the Father.”