The Pope has spent this past weekend in Savona and Genoa. The program from the Vatican website is here. As well as the Italian texts of his words so far.
He has visited two shrines, celebrated two Masses, met with the Cathedral Chapter, youth and visited a pediatric hospital.
The Archdiocese of Genoa’s site has a lot – if you can navigate Italian!
Photos here.
You can read articles linked at the Papa Ratzinger Forum
More later, but here is Teresa Benedetta’s translation of the Pope’s homily yesterday, in Savona:
Dear friends, finding myself here in Savona, how can I not rejoice with you that this name is precisely that with which the Virgin Mary presented herself, when she appeared on March 18 in 1536 to a peasant and son of this land?
Madonna di Misericordia – Our Lady of Mercy – is the title under which she is venerated – and we have had an image of her for some years now, even in the Vatican Gardens.
But Mary was not speaking of herself, she never speaks of herself, always of God, and she did it with the name that is so old and yet always new: mercy, which is synonymous with love, with grace.
Here is all the essence of Christianity, because it is the essence of God himself. God is one, in that he is all and only Love, but precisely because he is Love, he is also openness, welcome, dialog. And in his relationship with us, human sinners, he is mercy, compassion, grace and forgiveness. God has created everything to exist, and he always and only wills life.
For whoever finds himself in danger, he is salvation. We just heard the Gospel of John: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son so that whoever believes in him will not die but have life eternal” (Jn 3,16).
In this giving of himself by God in the person of the Son, the entire Trinity is at work: the Father who places at our disposition what is most dear to him: the Son who, co-sentient with the Father, strips himself of his glory to give himself to us; the Spirit who comes from the peaceful divine embrace to water the deserts of humanity.
For this work of his mercy, God, disposing himself to take on our flesh, had to have a human Yes, the Yes of a woman who would become the Mother of his Incarnate Word, Jesus, the human face of divine Mercy.
Thus Mary became and will always be the Mother of Mercy, as she made herself known, even here in Savona.
In the course of the Church’s history, the Virgin Mary has done nothing but to invite her sons to return to God, to entrust themselves to him in prayer, to knock with confident insistence on the door of his merciful heart. In truth, he does not desire other than to pour into the world the super-abundance of his grace.