Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, who has been commissioned by Pope Francis to lead a mission to achieve peace in Ukraine, expressed his closeness to the people in Ukraine. He told that “anguish in the soul of the Ukrainian people who long for peace”, while its inhabitants are “swallowed by the fratricidal death machine that is war” on 25 May, Thursday.
The Archbishop of Bologna (Italy) and president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, remembered the “martyred people of Ukraine” in the homily of the Mass presided over in Saint Peter’s Basilica, on the day Closing of the Assembly of Italian Bishops.
“This celebration that sees us gathered around Peter, welcomed and supported by the presence of the one who presides over our communion in communion, helps us to contemplate what the Church is, offers us an icon of her human and spiritual reality, which is never idealized or virtual”, commented the Cardinal.
“We all come from our many Emmaus and we carry with us the sadness of those pilgrims with hearts swollen with disappointment, wounded, aggressive and bitter because their hopes are over.”
And he added: “Among these, whose faces and vicissitudes we carry in our hearts, I remember the anguish in the soul of the Ukrainian people who long for peace, and that of those who mourn those who never returned, swallowed up by the machine of fratricidal death that it’s war.”
“The Lord continues to make himself a pilgrim, he never tires of looking for us and urges us to set out to free ourselves from a destiny without community, to warm dull hearts and make them burn with love and hope,” noted Cardinal Zuppi.