The Pope’s Lenten Retreat is over, and Teresa has translated his remarks as the retreat drew to an end:

In the name of all of us gathered here, I wish to tell you, with all my heart, thank you, for the marvelous anagogy [mystical interpretation] that you have given us this week.

In the Holy Mass, before the Eucharistic Prayer, everyday we respond to the invitation ‘Lift up your hearts’ saying ‘We have lifted them up to the Lord’. But I am afraid this response may often be more ritual than experiential.

But you have taught us this week to lift and elevate our hearts towards the invisible on high, towards true reality. And you have also given us the key to respond to everyday reality.

During your first meditation, I noticed that the marquetry on my prie-dieu shows the Risen Christ surrounded by flying angels. And I thought to myself: Angels fly because they are not held down by the gravitational force of earthly things, that they move instead within the gravitational field of the Risen Lord. And that we ourselves can fly if we rise a bit above material gravitation to enter into the new gravitation of the Lord’s love.

You have shown us how to overcome this earthly gravitation in order to rise and enter into the Risen Lord’s sphere. For this, we thank you.

I would also like to thank you for giving us very acute and precise diagnoses of our situation today, and above all, you have shown us how behind so many phenomena of our times, even if apparently very remote from religion and from Christ, there is a question, an expectation, a desire, and to which omnipresent desire the only answer is Christ.

Thus you teach us to follow Christ with greater courage and to love the Church even more, the «Immaculata ex maculatis», she who is immaculate out of the sinful, as St. Ambrose has taught us.

Finally, I would like to thank you for your realism, your humor, and your concreteness, even up to the rather daring theology of one of your housekeepers: I would not dare refer her words ‘The Lord perhaps had his defects’ to the judgment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith!

In any case, we have learned from your thoughts, Your Eminence, and they will accompany us in the coming weeks.