Vatican Basilica Mass - Cardinal Gugerotti says "Pope Francis, who taught us to love the diversity and richness of the expression...I believe rejoices to see us together" Novemdiales for the Pope Homily

Still in the Easter season, Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti celebrated the 7th Novemdiales Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. Fraternity between the Eastern and Western Churches was at the heart of the homily, of the Cardinal, Prefect Emeritus of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, who reflected on the richness of the Eastern Christian spirituality. United in the Mass despite our differences; St. Peter’s Basilica was filled many members of the Eastern Catholic Churches for the Eucharistic celebration, and in their presence, the Cardinal expressed his gratitude for their acceptance.

 HOLY MASS ON THE 7TH DAY OF NOVENDIALI
(UPDATED Vatican Text Version) HOMILY OF CARDINAL CLAUDIO GUGEROTTI, FORMER PREFECT OF THE DICASTERY FOR THE EASTERN CHURCHES
Basilica of Saint Peter - Friday, 2 May 2025
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Beatitudes, venerable Cardinal Fathers, brothers and sisters,
a few days ago we prayed over the body of our Holy Father Francis and over that body we proclaimed our unshakable faith in the resurrection of the dead. In these days our certainty and our invocation continue so that the Lord may look with mercy upon his faithful servant.

The resurrection, in fact, as the first reading reminds us, is not a phenomenon intrinsic to human nature. It is God who resurrects us, through his Spirit. From the waters of Baptism we have emerged as new creatures, relatives of God, his intimates or, as Saint Paul says, adopted children and no longer slaves. And it is precisely because we are children that in the same Spirit we are allowed to cry out our invocation: “Abba, Father”. The entire creation joins this cry, which, in the pangs of childbirth, awaits its healing. Creation and the human person seem to have so little value today. Yet among us there are Cardinals, like those from Africa, who spontaneously feel the beauty of the fruit of these pangs, because a new life is of inestimable value to their people.

The theme of creation then emerges as a traveling companion of humanity and in solidarity with it, just as it asks for solidarity from the human race, so that it may be respected and healed. This is a theme that was very dear to our Pope Francis.

All around us we do nothing but perceive the cry of creation and in it that of those who are destined for glory and that is the purpose for which creation was desired: the human person. The earth cries out, but above all a humanity overwhelmed by hatred cries out, in turn the fruit of a profound devaluation of the value of life which, as we have heard, for us Christians is participation in the family of God, to the point of concorporeality and consanguinity with Christ the Lord, whom we are celebrating in this sacrament of the Eucharist.

Very often this desperate humanity struggles to express in the cry its prayer and invocation to the God of life. And it is then, St. Paul reminds us, that the spirit intervenes within us and makes our rocky silences and our unexpressed tears an invocation to our God with inexpressible groans or, as it can also be translated, with unexpressed, that is, silent, groans. This is an expression so dear to the Eastern Christian world that sees in the inability to express God (apophasis) one of the characteristics of theology: contemplation of the incomprehensible, a vain attempt to remove the veil from the supreme truth and therefore, at most, the possibility of saying, as Saint Thomas Aquinas will repeat in the West, not what God is, but what He is not.

Here is a great lesson for us who often feel like we are the masters of God, the perfect knowers of the truth, while we are only pilgrims to whom the Word has been given, who is the incarnate Son of God, because what has given us the gift of living in the glory of God is only the fruit of grace and of that infusion of the Holy Spirit that makes us, precisely, "spiritual". And in the East, the spiritual father and mother are the monk, the nun or in any case the guide of those who seek God. We Westerners too, significantly before having called these people spiritual "directors", called them spiritual fathers and mothers. An interesting change.

In this Eucharist we intend to unite ourselves as we can and know, despite our aridity, distractions, continuous loss of focus on the only necessary, to the inexpressible groan of the Spirit who cries out to God what is pleasing to him and what fully expresses the groan of our nature, which we do not know how to formulate in words, also because we do not even give ourselves, overwhelmed by haste, the time to know ourselves, to know him, to invoke him. Saint Augustine invites us to enter within ourselves because it is there that we can find the authentic meaning that not only expresses what we are, but cries out to the Father our need to be beloved children, repeating: “Abbá, Father”: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interno homine habitat veritas”.

He who loves his life will lose it - the Gospel according to John reminds us - and he who hates his life will find it. In this extreme phrase, the Lord expresses our specificity as Christians, considered by the world to be followers of a loser, a loser of life, who through death, and not through the building of an earthly kingdom, saved the world and redeemed each of us.

Pope Francis has taught us to gather the cry of violated life, to take it up and present it to the Father, but also to work to concretely alleviate the pain that this cry arouses, at any latitude and in the infinite ways in which evil weakens and destroys us.

Today the liturgy is animated and participated in by some of the Fathers and sons and daughters of the Eastern Catholic Churches, present together with us to bear witness to the richness of their experience of faith and the cry of their suffering, offered for the eternal rest of the deceased Pontiff.

To them we say thank you for having accepted to enrich the catholicity of the Church with the variety of their experiences, their cultures, but above all their very rich spirituality. Children of the beginnings of Christianity, they have carried in their hearts, together with their Orthodox brothers and sisters, the flavor of the land of the Lord, and some even continue to speak the language that Jesus Christ spoke.

Through the prodigious and painful developments of their history, they reached important dimensions and enriched the treasure of Christian theology with a contribution as original as it is, in large part, unknown to us Westerners.

In the past, Eastern Catholics agreed to adhere to full communion with the successor of the apostle Peter whose body rests in this Basilica. And it is in the name of this union that they have testified, often with blood or persecution, their faith. Now partly reduced, in number and strength but not in faith, precisely by wars and intolerance, these brothers and sisters of ours remain firmly attached to a sense of Catholicity that does not exclude, but rather implies, the recognition of their specificity.

In the course of history they were sometimes poorly understood by us Westerners, who, in some eras, judged them and decided what of what they, descendants of apostles and martyrs, believed was or was not faithful to authentic theology (i.e. ours), while their Orthodox brothers, blood relatives and participants in the same culture, liturgy and way of feeling the being and working of God, considered them runaways, lost to their origin and assimilated to a world then considered mutually incompatible.

Pope Francis, who taught us to love the diversity and richness of the expression of all that is human, today I believe rejoices in seeing us together for prayer for him and for his intercession. And we are once again committed, while many of them are forced to leave their ancient lands, which were the Holy Land, to save their lives and see a better world, to sensitize ourselves, as our Pope wanted, to welcome them and help them in our lands to preserve the specificity of their Christian contribution, which is an integral part of our being the Catholic Church.

In the eyes and hearts of our brothers and sisters of the East it has always been dear to preserve the incredible paradox of the Christian event: on the one hand the misery of our being sin, on the other the infinite mercy of God who has placed us next to his throne to share even his being, through what with the great Bishop and Doctor Saint Athanasius, whom the Church remembers today, they define as “divinization”.

Their liturgy is all woven with this wonder. And so, for example, in this liturgical season, the Byzantine tradition endlessly repeats this ineffable experience, saying, singing and communicating to others: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death with death, and to the dead in the tombs he has bestowed life”. And they repeat it constantly, as if to make it enter into their own hearts and those of others.

This same wonder is also expressed in the Armenian liturgy, in praying with the words of that Saint Gregory of Narek whom Pope Francis himself wanted to include among the Doctors of the Church and whom tradition has made an integral part of the Eucharistic euchology: “We implore you, Lord, that our sins may be consumed by fire as those of the prophet were consumed by the burning coal offered to him with tongs, so that in all things your mercy may be proclaimed as the sweetness of the Father was announced through the Son of God, who led the prodigal son to return to his father’s inheritance and guided the prostitutes to the beatitude of the righteous in the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I too am one of them: receive me too like them, as one in need of your great love for humanity, I who live for your graces”.

Here are just two examples of the vibrant force with which the emotion of the heart mixes in the East with the lucidity of the mind to describe our immense poverty saved by the infinity of God's love.

Dear brother Cardinals, as the days draw ever closer when we will be called to choose the new Pope, let us place on our lips the invocation of the Holy Spirit that a great Eastern Father, Saint Symeon the New Theologian, wrote at the beginning of his hymns: "Come, true light; come, eternal life; come, hidden mystery; come, nameless treasure; come, ineffable reality; come, inconceivable person; come, endless happiness; come, light without sunset; come, infallible expectation of all those who must be saved. Come, you who my miserable soul has desired and desires. Come, you, the only one, to me, alone, because you see that I am alone; so that, seeing you forever, I, dead, may live; possessing may you, I, the poor, always be rich and richer than kings; I who, eating and drinking of you and dressing myself in you at every moment, pass from delight to delight to inexpressible goods, because you are every good and every glory and every delight and it is to you that the glory belongs, O holy, consubstantial and life-giving Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (…) now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen”.