On the ninth and final day of Novendiales, the nine days of mourning for Pope Francis, French Cardinal Dominique Mamberti reflected on the papal mission to love and serve Christ and his Church.
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The mission of a pope “is love itself, which becomes service to the Church and to all humanity,” the cardinal said in St. Peter’s Basilica.
The Mass for the ninth and last of the Novendiales was celebrated for the third Sunday of Easter.
In his homily, Mamberti, who was the prefect of the supreme tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s final court of appeal, since 2014, spoke about the day’s Gospel passage, in which Jesus asks St. Peter three times if he loves him, calling on him to “feed my lambs” and “tend my sheep.”
“Love is the key word of this Gospel passage,” Mamberti said. “The first to recognize Jesus is ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ John.”
In the dialogue between Jesus and Peter, Jesus uses “the verb to love, a strong word, while Peter, mindful of the betrayal responds with the less demanding expression, ‘to care,’ and the third time Jesus himself uses the expression to care, adjusting to the apostle’s weakness,” the cardinal said.
Quoting Pope Benedict XVI, Mamberti noted that although Peter knew that Jesus was satisfied with his “‘poor love, the only one of which he [was] capable. … It is precisely this divine adjustment that gives hope to the disciple.’”
From that point on, Peter followed the Lord with a keen awareness of his own fragility but was not discouraged, Mamberti said, knowing that the Lord was beside him.
Mamberti then quoted St. John Paul II, who said regarding the Gospel passage that “every day the same dialogue between Jesus and Peter takes place within my heart. He, though aware of my human frailty, encourages me to respond with confidence like Peter: ‘Lord,you know everything; you know that I love you’ (Jn 21:17).”
“We have all admired how much Pope Francis, animated by the Lord’s love and carried by his grace, has been faithful to his mission to the utmost consumption of his strength,” Mamberti continued.
Alluding to the first reading of the day from the Acts of the Apostles, Mamberti said Pope Francis “has reminded the powerful that we must obey God rather than men and proclaimed to all humanity the joy of the Gospel, the merciful Father, Christ the savior. He did this in his magisterium, in his travels, in his gestures, in his lifestyle.”
The cardinal recalled how he was close to Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, April 20, as the Holy Father gave his final “urbi et orbi” blessing before the crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, one day before he passed away.
Mamberti said he witnessed Pope Francis’ “suffering but above all his courage and determination to serve the people of God to the end.”
Noting that adoration is “an essential dimension of the Church’s mission and the lives of the faithful,” Mamberti observed that “this capacity that gives adoration was not difficult to recognize in Pope Francis.”
“His intense pastoral life, his countless meetings, were grounded in the long moments of prayer that the Ignatian discipline had imprinted in him,” he said.
Everything Francis did, Mamberti said, “he did under the gaze of Mary,” recalling the 126 times the late pope visited the “Salus Populi Romani” icon in the Basilica of St. Mary Major to pray.
“And now that he rests at the beloved image,” Mamberti said, “we entrust him with gratitude and confidence to the intercession of the mother of the Lord and our mother.”
