Pope Francis offered prayers for the ‘tormented Ukrainian people and the Palestinian and Israeli populations’ during his traditional Sunday blessing.
Giving his blessing from a window overlooking St Peter’s Square at the Vatican on New Year’s Eve, the pope recalled 2023 as a year marked by wartime suffering.
As well as offering his prayers to Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, he also spoke of ‘the Sudanese people and many others’ who have suffered.
‘At the end of the year, we will have the courage to ask ourselves how many human lives have been shattered by armed conflict, how many dead and how much destruction, how much suffering, how much poverty,’ the pontiff said.
In the last year, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has raged on, while Israel has continued to bombard Gaza after going to war with Hamas in response to the terrorists slaughtering 1,200 Israelis on October 7. Thousands have also been killed in crossfire amid a brutal civil war in Sudan.
Pope Francis offered prayers for the ‘tormented Ukrainian people and the Palestinian and Israeli populations’ during his traditional Sunday blessing
Rescuers respond at the site of a missile strike on a bank building on December 31, 2023 in Kharkiv, Ukraine
At his Sunday blessing, Francis also recalled his predecessor Pope Benedict’s love and wisdom on the anniversary of his death.
Benedict, the first pope to retire in six centuries, died last December 31 at the age of 95 in the Vatican monastery where he spent 10 years as a pope emeritus.
He is buried in the grottoes underneath St Peter’s Basilica. Speaking at the end of his weekly noon blessing, Francis said the faithful feel ‘so much love, so much gratitude, so much admiration’ for Benedict.
He praised the ‘love and wisdom’ with which Benedict guided the church and asked for a round of applause from the pilgrims and tourists gathered in St Peter’s Square.
Earlier in the day, Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, celebrated a special Mass in the basilica and then participated in an anniversary event to reflect on Benedict’s legacy.
Archbishop Gaenswein acknowledged some of the polemics that surrounded Benedict’s decade-long retirement alongside Francis in the Vatican, but said they would be forgotten in favour of the substance of his ministry and his final words: ‘Lord, I love you.’ History, Archbishop Gaenswein said, would judge Benedict as a ‘great theologian, a very simple person and a man of deep faith.’
Francis frequently praised Benedict’s decision to retire as courageous and said he, too, might follow in his footsteps.
Giving his blessing from a window overlooking St Peter’s Square at the Vatican, the pope recalled 2023 as a year marked by wartime suffering
Smoke rises from the residential area in Gaza seen from Nahal Oz as Israeli attacks continue in Nahal Oz
A man walks amid debris after Russian missile attack on December 31, 2023 in Kharkiv, Ukraine
But now that Benedict has died, Francis has reaffirmed the papacy is generally a job for life, and a consensus has emerged that the unprecedented reality of having two popes living side by side in the Vatican created problems that must be addressed before any future pope decides to step down.
Benedict, a noted conservative theologian who spent a quarter of a century as the Vatican’s doctrine chief, remained a point of reference for conservatives and traditionalists, who have only increased their criticism of Francis in the year since he died.
Francis, for his part, has appeared now to feel more free to impose his progressive vision of a reformed church now he is no longer under Benedict’s shadow.
People displaced by the conflict in Sudan ride atop the back of a truck moving along a road in Wad Madani, the capital of al-Jazirah state
Archbishop Gaenswein, whom Francis exiled to his native Germany soon after the death, recalled that Benedict had only expected to live a few months, maybe a year, after his 2013 resignation.
Despite his longer-than-expected retirement, Benedict stayed true to his pledge to pray for the church and for his successor, he said.
‘I pray that he will be a saint,’ Archbishop Gaenswein said.
‘I wish he would be a saint, and I’m convinced he will be a saint.’ Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni also praised Benedict as ‘a great man of history and a giant of reason, faith and the positive synthesis between the two’.
In a statement, she said his spiritual and intellectual legacy would live on even among nonbelievers because of its ‘profound civic value’ and ability to speak to people’s minds and hearts.