An entire community gathered in prayer to greet and say thanks to Pope Francis, for the twelve years of the ministry during which he has made known the face of God in the poor, in the colored, in the disheartened, in those who lived the drama of solitude or did not have the comfort of faith. It is Messina’s response to the “call” of Archbishop Giovanni Accolla and his auxiliary Cesare Di Pietro That last night in the cathedral they celebrated the mass in suffrage of the Pope who died on Monday Easter. Great participation by priests, religious and religious, deacons, young people on the way to the priesthood, of the representatives of the city institutions, of the ordinary people; Among them was those who have known him in person and who through the image without filters who in these years Bergoglio has given himself, that of the shepherd wearing the “stench of the sheep”.
Accolla used a few words borrowed from the writer Adolfo Rebecchini to outline the figure of this great Who, he said, “lived his life as a man of God with his feet on the ground, interpreting and testifying to his life the Gospel”. A useless servant, as Rebecchini defines him, an expression that means “trusting God, becoming witnesses of Jesus without fanaticism or anxieties, not seeking complicated things but being faithful to the little ones as to the big ones, giving themselves by renouncing forever to collect the fruits of one’s work”; This was Pope Francis, who was born in life he leaves a great spiritual inheritance.
He underlined it during the direct rite broadcast by RTP Msgr. Giò Tavilla, director of the social communications office, remembering his meeting with the Holy Father, in August 2016; It was on that occasion that he found the courage to ask when Messina, for months vacant, “would have had the new shepherd”, receiving the direct response of Francesco who promptly said to him – “In two months you will have the archbishop”. A choral mass in the prayers recited and sung with several voices by the Messina choristers of the Diocesan Choir S. Maria Maria della Lettera and the Perosian, to whom the entries of the Alps of the Ensemble Jean Philipe Rameau from France were exceptionally joined by the Alps that should have been exhibited in a concert then canceled for mourning.