“The first thing I would like to say to you is thank you! Thank you for the support of your prayers”. At his first General Audience since his hospital stay, Pope Leo XIV spoke off the cuff to thank the enormous crowd that had gathered to pray for him in St Peter’s Square, despite the torrential rain in Rome. Just eight days after undergoing surgery at the Gemelli Polyclinic for a lung adenocarcinoma, which required the removal of the lower lobe of his right lung, today’s audience marked a full return to normality for the Holy Father. Despite still being in recovery, he entered through the Arch of the Bells aboard the Popemobile, open at the sides and covered only at the top to shelter him from the rain.
“Thanks be to God for His generosity”, he continued extemporaneously at the beginning of his catechesis. “Let us all renew our trust in God’s goodness and mercy”,
he urged. An immense crowd of faithful had gathered to listen to him, filling all the entrances an hour before the usual Wednesday appointment. Along the route taken by the Pope through the various sections of the square, bordered by Bernini’s colonnade, people applauded and clapped their hands, repeatedly chanting his name in different languages at the top of their voices. The Pope’s return to normality was also evident during the audience in the Clementine Hall granted immediately before the general audience to those attending the conference “Holiness in History”, organised by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
“It is good to see so much enthusiasm for today’s saints!”
was his first, off-the-cuff greeting to the participants.
“The well-being of the individual and of human and Christian society is intimately linked with the healthy condition of that community produced by marriage and family”, the Pope said as he continued his series of catecheses on Gaudium et Spes, focusing on the sacrament of marriage, understood as the “mutual self-giving of man and woman”, and on marital fruitfulness. “Not limited to erotic attraction, which it nonetheless encompasses, conjugal love involves the entire will of the spouses, enlivening the affections of their hearts and expressing itself through sentiments and gestures of tenderness”, Leo XIV explained. “Embracing the good of the whole person of both man and woman, who are equal in dignity, this love pervades the entire life of the spouses, finding expression in acts proper exclusively to marriage. Whilst signifying integral love from person to person, the unique intimacy between the spouses fosters their mutual self-giving and enriches their shared joy”.
Children, the Pope reiterated, are “the supreme gift of marriage”. It follows both that “from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care”, renouncing “abortion and infanticide”, and that “the acts themselves which are proper to conjugal love and which are exercised in accord with genuine human dignity must be honoured with great reverence”.
Turning to the “social function of the family”, which the conciliar document describes as “a school of deeper humanity” and “the foundation of society”, Leo called on “all those with social responsibilities, especially in the political and cultural spheres, to fulfil their duty to
work efficiently for the welfare of marriage and the family”.
“This task is more urgent than ever before”, he pointed out. “The Church is well aware of this, as shown by the pastoral concern of the Popes who have succeeded one another since the last Council, right up to the two Synodal Assemblies convened by Pope Francis, which were addressed again in recent days by the Heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Presidents of the Episcopal Conferences”.
“The history of the world without the saints would be immensely poorer; in other words, less human”,
he said in the Clementine Hall. Canonised holiness “must be proven by authentic credible testimonies that are beyond reproach”, the Pope explained, recalling that it was “an authoritative historian such as Pope Pius XI who established the Historical Section within the then Sacred Congregation of Rites, opening the causes of the saints to the specific application of the historical-critical method”. “Even the examination of ‘recent causes’ cannot proceed without serious and rigorous verification of all the material gathered”, Leo XIV stressed. “The causes for sainthood make use of the tools proper to the study of history, even though their aim is not to produce historiography, but rather to bring to light the exemplary character, spirituality and reputation for holiness of the candidates for sainthood”.
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