Your Eminence,
Your Grace,
Your Excellency,
Reverend Father,
In these days, together with my staff, I have thought and prayed in communion with each of you, your priests, your religious, catechists, pastoral workers, and all the flock entrusted to you. We have experienced a new Good Friday with new wounds caused by the earthquake and the taking root of hatred and division. We have walked the path of the Cross and found ourselves at its feet with tears, on our knees. But those nails were removed, the body of Christ laid in a tomb. Had he remained there, we would not know what love is, what it means to love, what friendship, fraternity, communion and forgiveness mean: we would not be the men we are.
At the Eighth Station of the Way of the Cross “Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem”, Pope Francis’ meditation explains the meaning of our pain and the newness that comes from this pain when we follow Christ: “God’s heart throbs with love for his people; he creates a new city: “Weep for yourselves and for your children.” There is a kind of weeping, indeed, which can bring forth a new birth. It brings forth tears of regret, unabashed and unrestrained. Lord, our broken world, and the hurts and offences that tear our human family apart, call for tears that are heartfelt and not merely perfunctory. Otherwise, the apocalyptic visions will all come true: we will no longer generate life, and everything around us will collapse. Faith, on the other hand, can move mountains. The mountains and the hills will not crash down upon us, but a path will open up in their midst. It is your path, Jesus: an uphill path, a path on which the apostles abandoned you, while the faithful women — the mothers of the Church — continued to follow you.”
We can rejoice because Christ is risen and has not left us alone with our pain and tears. Christ came and is coming to be with us, to lift us up and give us new vigour to walk together full of hope, to make us discover that we are members of one body, His mystical body. He, and only He, achieves that unity and peace of which we alone are incapable. It is He who dialogues with us and opens our hearts to meet and dialogue with all as a sign of His love and forgiveness.
Only the Risen Christ brings the newness that changes our lives and the world. Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness which God brings us, the newness which God asks of us. We are like the Apostles in the Gospel: often we would prefer to hold on to our own security, to stand in front of a tomb, to think about someone who has died. We are afraid of God’s surprises. He always surprises us!
Let us not be closed to the newness that God wants to bring into our lives! Are we often weary, disheartened and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won’t be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive if only we open ourselves to him.
In the joy of the Risen Christ, we thank God the Father for the spiritual and concrete closeness of Pope Francis and so many of our brothers and sisters. We pray for Pope Francis and with him we pray for peace in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Sudan e South Sudan.
May Mary help us to grow in friendship with her Son and to spread it around us.

Msgr. Andrea Ferrante
Chargé d’Affaires a.i.
Apostolic Nunciature in Myanmar