Pope in Nagasaki: Love overcomes hatred, selfishness

Nun reads a Bidding Prayer - screenshot

Source: Vatican News/WNS

More than 35,000 people gathered in Nagasaki's Baseball Stadium on Sunday afternoon for Mass with Pope Francis on the Feast of Christ the King. The broken statue of Our Lady, salvaged from the ruins of Nagasaki Cathedral, was featured on the altar.

In his homily the Holy Father recalled both the victims of the atomic bomb and the thousands of Christians killed for their faith during the centuries of persecution in Japan.

He said: " We want to follow in their path, walk in their footsteps and to profess courageously that the love poured out in sacrifice for us by Christ crucified is capable of overcoming all manner of hatred, selfishness mockery and evasion.

As missionary disciples and witnesses and heralds of things to come, the Pope said, we cannot become resigned in the face of evil in any of its forms. Rather, we are called to be a leaven of Christ's Kingdom wherever we find ourselves: in the family, at work or in society at large. We are to be a little opening through which the Spirit continues to breathe hope among peoples.

The kingdom of heaven, our common goal, the Pope explained, is not only about tomorrow but also of today, amid the indifference that so often surrounds and silences the sick and disabled, the elderly and the abandoned, refugees and immigrant workers. All of them, the Pope said, are a living sacrament of Christ our King, because Jesus Himself wanted to be identified in their faces.

Referring to the day's Gospel reading, Pope Francis noted that on Calvary, while many voices remained silent and others jeered, the voice of the good thief rose to the defence of the innocent victim of suffering. "His was a brave profession of faith," said the Pope, adding, "each of us has the same possibility: we can choose to remain silent, to jeer or to prophesy."

"Nagasaki bears in its soul a wound difficult to heal, a scar born of the incomprehensible suffering endured by so many innocent victims of wars past and those of the present, when a third World War is being waged piecemeal."

Like the good thief, he said, "Let us lift our voices here and pray together for all those who even now are suffering in their flesh from this sin that cries out to heaven."