A statement released by the Holy See press office indicates that at the mass for this date, celebrated this morning in St. Peter’s Basilica, the pontiff asked that “Please, let us not forget the poor!”.
At 12 noon this Sunday, Francis prayed the Angelus from the window of his study in the Vatican Apostolic Palace before some 25,000 faithful and pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square, and after concluding that ceremony, he participated in a meal in the Paul VI Hall, offered to some 1,300 poor people.
The Pope called there to be close to the suffering of those in need, to alleviate their wounds and change their fate,” while asserting that we must focus on the anguish so widespread in our time, but at the same time on hope, “which always challenges each other in a duel in the field of our heart.”
“We see the sun darken and the moon go out, we see hunger and famine that oppresses so many brothers and sisters, we see the horrors of war and the deaths of innocents, and we run the risk of sinking into discouragement,” he said, and asked not only to look at these great problems, but what we can do every day to alleviate them. To improve the reality that surrounds us we must pay attention to our lifestyles, to the attention and care of the environment, to the tenacious search for justice, to social and political commitment, as well as to sharing our goods with the poor, he said.
At the event, the Bishop of Rome thanked the Catholic dioceses and parishes for their initiatives of solidarity with the most disadvantaged, which put attention to the needs of the poor in their neighbourhoods at the center of their pastoral activities, in the face of an aggravation of this problem.
The pastoral organization of the Catholic Church, Caritas, revealed in its recent report Grass in the Cracks, that in Italy 5,694,000 people suffer from absolute poverty, a figure equivalent to 9.7 percent of the population.
Among these poor people are 1,295,000 children, the highest number recorded so far, while in the last 10 years there has been an uninterrupted increase in Italian families suffering from this situation, which now totals 2,217,000, 8.4 percent of households.
The report highlighted the worsening of the situation in the last decade, as the number of people living in absolute poverty rose from 6.9 percent in 2014 to 9.7 percentage, last year of the total population of this nation, with a population of almost 59 million people.
ef/oda/ort
