The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella paid homage to St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of Italy, with the lighting of the votive lamp. “Peace is a right inscribed in the conscience and it represents the deepest aspiration of every person, as soon as he looks up beyond his own present ”, claimed Mattarella speaking in Assisi for the celebrations in honor of the 'Poverello'. "We do not surrender to the logic of war - he added - that consumes people's reason and life and pushes towards intolerable growth of deaths and devastation. Which is making the world poorer and threatening to set it towards destruction. So here is the request to abandon the arrogance that triggered the war. So here is the request for dialogue, to break this spiral ”, exhorted the head of state.
Honor to St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of Italy
Mattarella then claimed: "Peace is not only the absence of fighting but, as Saint Francis reminds us, it is inherent in harmony with creation.. When resources are consumed to excess, when nature is plundered, when inequalities are created between peoples, when the destiny of future generations dries up, we move away from peace. We must repair, return, is the great urgency of our age. And we have no time beyond that. It is a task that concerns us all, no one is irrelevant: a task that must be carried out together ”.
Mattarella then spoke of the pandemic that “is not definitively defeated, even if the action of vaccines and the responsible response of the Italians have slowed its expansion, greatly reduced the danger and saved the lives of tens of thousands of people. Collective intelligence and responsibility will still be needed ”.
The Church entrusts the nation to the Poverello
In Assisi, in the basilica dedicated to the saint crowded with ecclesiastical authorities and institutional representatives, Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, president of the Italian Bishops' Conference, also spoke. The difficulties are by no means over. We see it dramatically in the world and in our country. We entrust Italy to the intercession of our Patron. Support, in such a decisive moment, political love and service to the common home, so that in the necessary diversity all contribute to the national interest.
Indispensable for strengthening the institutions without which no plan can be realized and for dealing with such huge thorns. May our Patron, a universal man, help Europe to live up to the tradition that created it and the whole world not to resign itself in the face of war. He, friend of all, will help us to defeat all speculative logic, small or large, anonymous and inhuman, because all speculation is a form of looting that increases injustices and creates a lot of poverty ”.
(Photo Paolo Giandotti - Press Office for the Press and Communication of the Presidency of the Republic / quirinale.it)
