DR CONGO The Pope from the Congo: you, Christian who use violence, lay down your arms

Francis’ call during the mass celebrated at the Kinshasa airport before more than a million faithful, in a country deeply wounded by the conflict. “In a world discouraged by violence and war let us repeat with Jesus: peace be with you.”

Kinshasa () – A huge crowd, well over a million people from all over the Democratic Republic of Congo, participated this morning in the mass that Pope Francis presided over in the area of ​​the Ndolo airport in Kinshasa, at the time highlight of the second day of his trip to Africa. Before them – in this country deeply scarred by war, which in recent weeks has again sowed blood and destruction in the east of the country – the pontiff resounded the evangelical passage of the greeting of the Risen One to the disciples: “Peace be with you “. “Jesus proclaims peace while there is rubble in the hearts of the disciples, he announces life while they feel death inside them,” he commented in the homily of the liturgy, dotted with songs and the richness of African colors. The peace of Jesus comes at the moment when it seemed that everything had ended, at the most unexpected and unsuspected moment, when there was not even a hint of peace”.

A moment that the Democratic Republic of Congo, plunged into war for thirty years, knows all too well, like so many other wounded areas in the world today. We cannot allow sadness to prevail in us,” the Pope told the faithful, “we cannot allow resignation and fatalism to creep in. If we breathe this climate around us, let it not be so for us: in a world discouraged by violence and war, Christians do like Jesus. He, almost insisting, repeated to the disciples: peace be with you; and we are called to make our own and tell the world this unexpected and prophetic announcement of peace”.

From Kinshasa, Francis indicated three “sources” to continue nourishing peace: forgiveness, community and mission. Above all, forgiveness: “It is not about leaving everything behind as if nothing had happened,” he explained, “but about opening your heart to others with love. This is what Jesus does: before the misery of those who denied him and abandoned, shows the wounds and opens the fountain of mercy. He does not use many words, but he opens wide his wounded heart, to tell us that he is always wounded with love for us”.

Jesus knows your wounds, “continually infected by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the balm of hope seem never to arrive”. But he wishes “to anoint us with his forgiveness to give us peace and the courage to be able to forgive ourselves, the courage to carry out a great amnesty of the heart”.

“May today be a time of grace to welcome and live the forgiveness of Jesus”, Pope Francis invited the Congolese. “May the time be right for you, who carry a heavy load on your heart and need to be lifted to breathe again. And may it be the right time for you, who in this country call yourself a Christian but use violence; to The Lord says to you: ‘Lay down your weapons, embrace mercy'”. He asked the faithful to remove the Crucifix from their necks and pockets, to take it in their hands and bring it close to their hearts “to share his wounds with those of Jesus.” “Let us give Christ the opportunity to heal our hearts, let us discard in Him the past, all fears and sorrows”.

Along with forgiveness, the second source of peace is community: “The risen Jesus does not address his disciples individually, but meets with them: he speaks to them in the plural. There is no Christianity without community, just as there is no peace without fraternity” . He warned against the risk of “being together but each going his own way, looking in society, but also in the Church, for power, career, ambitions.” He talks about the way “not to fall into the traps of power and money, not to give in to divisions, to the flattery of careerism that corrode the community, to the false illusions of pleasure and witchcraft that lock us in. themselves”. The antidote,” he explains, “is to have the courage to look at the poor and listen to them, because they are members of our community and not strangers to be erased from sight and consciousness. Open your heart to others, instead of closing it to your own problems or vanities.”

Finally, the mission, because peace must also be announced: “Christians, sent by Christ, are called by definition to be consciences of peace in the world – he concluded -; not only critical consciences, but above all witnesses of love; not pretenders to their own rights, but to those of the Gospel, which are fraternity, love and forgiveness; not seekers of their own interests, but missionaries of the crazy love that God has for every human being”.