Saturday, April 26, 2025 will always be a banner day for Peggy and me. We recorded Francis’ Memorial Celebration on two different channels and watched them both when we woke up and were rewarded with an ancient city that still remains in so many ways the center of planet earth. The colors of the vestments, the robes, the dresses and the suits, but especially of the faces, clearly showed the oneness of humanity that gave such a rebuke to the violence, destruction, the suffering and the killing among our brothers and sisters in too many parts of the planet. Pope Francis gave his life in the effort to proclaim our God-given Unity, which we humans have never really accepted. Just one example: the absolute barbarity of war, of brother slaughtering brother, still, after thousands of years of such mindless inhumane destruction. “Where have all the flowers gone? “ Indeed. But for one day, through the life and death of a very ordinary man, as Bergoglio himself said, from the “END OF THE EARTH”, from the tip of South America, as far as you can get from the marble halls of the Vatican, God showed an Eternal Father’s Love for all of us “poor children of Eve” who are mysteriously God’s children from eternity to eternity. Pope Francis, in his thirteen years as Pontifex, ( builder of bridges) tried so hard to bring God’s family together that he made 47 international trips, and flew 291,423 miles. That is 11.6 times around he world.
Thank you, Pope Francis. You asked us to pray for you. Now you have to pray for us: tutti, tutti, ALL OF US !!! Amen.
Sal Umana 