“God doesn’t as us to be super-heroes,” assured Cardinal Pietro Parolin, on February 11, 2017, the 25th World Day of the Sick. During an international Mass at Lourdes, France, in the Basilica of Saint Pius X, the Holy See’s Secretary of State invited each one to renew his “here I am” to God, who “asks us to trust Him.”
The Vatican’s “Number Two” stressed during his homily that to celebrate this Day in the Marian city of Lourdes “is to remember the numerous sick who come on pilgrimage to the grotto of Massabielle, to sing the praises of her that all generations proclaim blessed.” It is also “to thank the Lord for all the people … who come to this blessed place to find relief and hope.” And it is “to think of all those that benefit from God’s tenderness through spiritual and corporal works of mercy.”
In face of “fears” aroused by sickness and death, he continued, “God doesn’t ask us to be super-heroes, neither does He ask us to deny what we are living with difficulty, by wearing perhaps the mask of one who is above all that humiliates or limits him/her.”
On the contrary, stressed Cardinal Parolin, who spoke in French, “God asks us to give Him credit and to trust in Him; He asks us not to fear because He comes, because He makes Himself close, because He doesn’t forget us, because we are important to Him, because we are those with whom He wants to share His life. …Fear not, for I am with you. Fear not for I am with you.”
Believers, continued the Secretary of State, “are those who answer: ‘we are here, we are with you.’ It’s this dialogue that impedes frailty becoming an obstacle in regard to God and in regard to others (…). It’s our ‘here I am’ to God that renders us living.”
Cardinal Parolin recalled those who live in “darkness,” those who feel themselves “a burden” for others, those who have been “transformed into objects, numbers, protocols.” Christ, he said, “doesn’t ask us to change the time; He asks us to live this time enlightened by His hour; He asks us to have His hour enter this time; He wishes to share with us what made of His hour an experience of life, and not of death: … His ‘here I am’ to God.”
He gave as a model “the Immaculate Mother,” “poor with the poor,” who “pushes us to receive, to desire, to seek and to build the dialogue of ‘Here I am,’ because in this dialogue one van be clothed with glory, clothed with light.”
“Let us choose to be living! May each age of our life let God’s proclamation resound: ‘fear not, I am with you, fear not, I am with you.’ May each age of our life let our ‘here I am’ resound,” concluded Cardinal Parolin.
