Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, 69, from Verona, Italy, gave a profound and moving homily yesterday at a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica (here is a link to a video of the entire Mass; at precisely 27:30 the homily begins, and, there is a simultaneous English translation)
“Come, true light; come, eternal life; come, hidden mystery; come, nameless treasure; come, ineffable reality; come, inconceivable person; come, endless joy; come, light without evening; come, unfailing hope of all who are to be saved. Come, you who have always desired and desire my miserable soul…” —A passage, citing St. Simeon the New Theologian, which Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti chose to close his homily yesterday, Friday, May 2, in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Gugerotti said he thinks the cardinals should keep these words in mind as they prepare to enter into the conclave to vote for a new Pope.
Among those in attendance at this Mass were the voting and non-voting cardinals, more than 100, who have come to Rome since the death of Pope Francis to prepare for the upcoming papal conclave.
The conclave is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, May 7, in four days.
The Mass was the seventh of nine “Novemdiale” Masses in St. Peter’s Basilica of prayer and mourning for Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, April 21.
Cardinal Gugerotti stressed that the resurrection which occurred on the first Easter is “not a phenomenon inherent to human nature”; rather, he said, it comes from God, “through His Spirit.”
In our work to try to “build bridges” between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox, including travel in eastern countries, I have had the occasion to meet and speak with Cardinal Gugerotti, and have found him to be a man of study, faith and prayer. This homily represents one example of these qualities in this man.
—RM
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Letter #31, 2025, Saturday, May 3: Gugerotti
Pope Francis passed away just after Easter, on Easter Monday morning, 12 days ago.
His funeral was celebrated on April 26, last Saturday.
His body was buried in a simple tomb in a niche next to the Chapel of the Salus Populi Romani [“Salvation of the Roman People”] icon which he had visited more than 100 times during his pontificate.
By pure chance, I, with a small group of pilgrims, saw the Pope in St. Peter’s Basilica early on the eve of Easter,. We were there early to attend the Easter vigil Mass at 7:30 pm, and we saw Pope Francis, unannounced, wheeled in his wheel-chair into the basilica, at about 5:30 pm.
Just in front of us, we saw him stop and remain in complete silence for about seven or eight minutes, in front of the central altar, sitting all alone. He spent those minutes in prayer.
He then asked to be pushed again, out of the basilica, and passed just next to us, and stopped, asking his aides to give three of the children traveling with us, on an Easter pilgrimage, three little lemon Easter candies. The children were thrilled and smiled at the Pope and wished him well.
The next morning, Easter morning, Francis met with Vice President JD Vance and his family, in his residence, the Domus Santa Marta, then he came out into the Square at noon to bid farewell to the faithful gathered for Easter Sunday Mass, and after saying “Happy Easter” to the crowds, returned to his residence. That was his last public appearance.
A few hours later, he passed from this world. His death was certified at 7:35 am on Easter Monday morning.
But in those minutes when he was in the basilica on Holy Saturday evening, in deep prayer for long minutes, then, giving gifts to children, were among his last actions before he died.
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The central message
The central message of the Church is the “Good News” of the resurrection.
Of Christ’s victory over sin and death on the first Easter morning.
It is the proclamation of an eternal dimension, an eternal meaning, to our lives, to our reality.
This proclamation means that the events of this life are not meaningless, but occur against an eternal backdrop, a backdrop invisible to these human eyes that we have, of flesh and blood, but visible to the eyes of the soul.
And this is why St. Irenaeus of Lyons in about the year 180 A.D. said that “The glory of God is man alive… but the life of man is the vision of God.”
In other words, the fully alive human being is God’s glory.
But we are fully alive only when our vision — physical, intellectual and spiritual — catches a glimpse of the eternal, holy God, and draws eternal life from that.
If in this life we are able to catch a glimpse of the Holy One, we are on the threshold of a kingdom which is “not of this world” — a kingdom, therefore, that is inaccessible to our flesh and blood, as long as we in this world, yet a kingdom that we ma encounter, glimpse, come to know, through this grace of seeing what is “above,” that is, through seeing God.
This is why our mission here, our preaching here, is essentially to try to assist others to catch a glimpse of the Lord.
This is what brings life to men, and God’s glory into the world.
And this, essentially, is the mission of the Pope: to confirm his brothers in their common task of communicating Christ to the world, to encounter Christ, to see Christ, who lives in an eternal kingdom which has an intimate connection with our world of space and time, through the Incarnation, and Passion, of our Lord.
If you read carefully, you will see that Cardinal Gugerotti speaks about all of these things, in an eloquent way, in the homily he delivered yesterday. (link)
Here below is my own translation of Cardinal Gugerotti’s homily from yesterday, which was given in Italian.
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From the Vatican Press Office Bulletin on May 2, 2025 (link)
“Come, True Light, Come, Eternal Life”
At 5:00 p.m. at yesterday afternoon, in the Vatican Basilica, the celebration of the Eucharist in suffrage of the Roman Pontiff Francis, on the VII day of the “Novemdiali.” [Nine days of mourning]
The Eastern Churches were especially invited to the Celebration.
The Concelebration was presided over by His Eminence Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, former Prefect of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches.
Below we publish the homily that His Eminence Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti gave during the Holy Mass:
Homily of His Eminence Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti
Friday, May 2, 2025, St. Peter’s Basilica
Beatitudes, venerable Cardinal Fathers, brothers and sisters,
A few days ago we prayed over the body of our Holy Father Francis, and over that body we proclaimed our unshakable faith in the resurrection of the dead. In these days our certainty and our invocation continue that the Lord look with mercy upon his faithful servant.
The resurrection, in fact, as the first reading reminds us, is not a phenomenon intrinsic to human nature.
It is God who resurrects us, through his Spirit.
From the waters of Baptism we emerged as new creatures, members of the family of God, his intimates or, as Saint Paul says, adopted children and no longer slaves.
And it is precisely because we are children that in the same Spirit we are allowed to cry out our invocation: “Abba, Father”.
The whole of creation joins in this cry, which, in the pangs of childbirth, awaits its healing.
Creation and the human person seem to have so little value today.
Yet among us there are Cardinals, like those from Africa, who spontaneously feel the beauty of the fruit of these birth pangs, because a new life is of inestimable value to their people.
The theme of creation emerges as a traveling companion of humanity and in solidarity with it, just as it asks for solidarity from the human race, so that it may be respected and healed.
This is a theme that was very dear to our Pope Francis.
All around us we do nothing but perceive the cry of creation and, in it, the cry of those who are destined for glory, and are the purpose for which creation was desired: the human person.
The earth cries out, but above all a humanity overwhelmed by hatred cries out, in turn the fruit of a profound devaluation of the value of life which, as we have heard, for us Christians is participation in the family of God, up to the incorporation of our bodies with the body and blood of Christ the Lord, whom we are celebrating in this sacrament of the Eucharist.
Very often, this desperate humanity struggles to express, in its cry, its prayer and invocation to the God of life.
And it is then, St. Paul reminds us, that the spirit intervenes, deep within us, and makes our stony silences, and our unexpressed tears, an invocation to our God with inexpressible groans or, as it can also be translated, with unexpressed, that is, silent, groans.
This is an expression so dear to the Eastern Christian world that sees in the inability to speak about God (apophasis) one of the characteristics of theology: contemplation of the incomprehensible… a vain attempt to remove the veil from the supreme truth… and therefore, at most, the possibility of using our words to express, as St. Thomas Aquinas will repeat in the West, not what God is, but what He is not.
Here is a great lesson for us who often feel like we are the masters of God, the perfect knowers of the truth, while we are only pilgrims to whom the Word has been given, who is the incarnate Son of God…
Because what has given us the gift of living in the glory of God is only the fruit of grace and of that infusion of the Holy Spirit that makes us, precisely, “spiritual.”
And in the East, the spiritual father and mother are the monk, the nun or in any case the guide of those who seek God.
We Westerners too, significantly before we began to call these people spiritual “directors,” called them spiritual fathers and mothers. (An interesting change.)
In this Eucharist, we intend to unite ourselves as we can and know, despite our aridity, distractions, continuous loss of focus on the only necessary, with the inexpressible groan of the Spirit, with the Spirit who cries out to God what is pleasing to Him and what fully expresses the groan of our nature, which we do not know how to formulate in words, also because we do not even give ourselves, overwhelmed by haste, the time to know ourselves, to know Him, to invoke Him.
Saint Augustine invites us to enter within ourselves, because it is there that we can find the authentic meaning that not only expresses what we are, but cries out to the Father our need to be beloved children, repeating: “Abbá, Father”: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interno homine habitat veritas.” [“Do not go outward, return into yourself; for in the inner man dwells the truth.”
He who loves his life will lose it — the Gospel according to John reminds us — and he who hates his life will find it.
In this extreme phrase, the Lord expresses our specificity as Christians, considered by the world to be followers of a loser, a loser of life, who through death, and not through the building of an earthly kingdom, saved the world and redeemed each of us.
Pope Francis has taught us to gather the cry of violated life, to take it into ourselves and present it to the Father, but also to work to concretely alleviate the pain that this cry arouses, at any latitude and in the infinite ways in which evil weakens and destroys us.
Today the liturgy is animated and participated in by some of the Fathers and sons and daughters of the Eastern Catholic Churches, present together with us to bear witness to the richness of their experience of faith and the cry of their suffering, offered for the eternal rest of the deceased Pontiff.
To them we say, “Thank you,” for having accepted to enrich the catholicity of the Church with the variety of their experiences, their cultures, but above all their very rich spirituality.
Children of the beginnings of Christianity, they have carried in their hearts, together with their Orthodox brothers and sisters, the taste of the Lord’s land, and some even continue to speak the language that Jesus Christ spoke.
Through the prodigious and painful developments of their history, they reached important dimensions and enriched the treasure of Christian theology with a contribution as original as it is, in large part, unknown to us Westerners.
In the past, Eastern Catholics have agreed to adhere to full communion with the successor of the apostle Peter whose body rests in this Basilica.
And it is in the name of this union that they have witnessed, often with blood or persecution, their faith.
Now partly reduced, in number and strength but not in faith, precisely by wars and intolerance, these brothers and sisters of ours remain firmly attached to a sense of Catholicity that does not exclude, but rather implies, the recognition of their specificity.
In the course of history they were sometimes poorly understood by us Westerners, who, in some eras, judged them and decided what of all that they, descendants of apostles and martyrs, believed was, or was not, faithful to authentic theology (that is, ours), while their Orthodox brothers, blood relatives and participants in the same culture, liturgy and way of feeling the being and working of God, considered them runaways, lost to their origins and assimilated to a world then considered mutually incompatible.
Pope Francis, who taught us to love the diversity and richness of the expression of all that is human, today I believe rejoices in seeing us together for prayer for him and for his intercession.
And we are once again committed, while many of them are forced to leave their ancient lands, which were the Holy Land, to save their lives and see a better world, to sensitize ourselves, as our Pope wanted, to welcome them and help them in our lands to preserve the specificity of their Christian contribution, which is an integral part of our being the Catholic Church.
In the eyes and hearts of our brothers and sisters of the East, it has always been dear to preserve the incredible paradox of the Christian event: on the one hand the misery of our being sin, on the other the infinite mercy of God who has placed us next to his throne to share even his being, through what with the great Bishop and Doctor Saint Athanasius, whom the Church remembers today, they call “divinization.”
Their liturgy is all woven with this wonder.
And so, for example, in this liturgical time, the Byzantine tradition endlessly repeats this ineffable experience, saying, singing and communicating to others: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death with death, and to the dead in the tombs he has bestowed life.”
And they repeat it constantly, as if to make it enter into their own hearts and those of others.
This same wonder is also expressed in the Armenian liturgy, in praying with the words of that Saint Gregory of Narek whom Pope Francis himself wanted to include among the Doctors of the Church and whom tradition has made an integral part of the Eucharistic euchology: “We implore you, Lord, that our sins may be consumed by fire as those of the prophet were consumed by the burning coal offered to him with tongs, so that, in all things, your mercy may be proclaimed as the sweetness of the Father was announced through the Son of God, who led the Prodigal Son to return to his father’s inheritance and guided the prostitutes to the beatitude of the righteous in the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I too am one of them: receive me too like them, as one in need of your great love for humanity, I who live for your graces.”
These are just two examples of the vibrant force with which the emotion of the heart mixes in the East with the lucidity of the mind to describe our immense poverty saved by the infinity of God’s love.
Dear brother Cardinals,
As the days draw ever closer when we will be called to choose the new Pope, let us place on our lips the invocation of the Holy Spirit that a great Eastern Father, Saint Symeon the New Theologian, wrote at the beginning of his hymns:
“Come, true light;
come, eternal life;
come, hidden mystery;
come, nameless treasure;
come, ineffable reality;
come, inconceivable person;
come, endless happiness;
come, light without sunset;
come, infallible expectation of all those who must be saved.
Come, you who my miserable soul has desired and desires.
Come, you, the only one, to me, alone, because you see that I am alone; so that, seeing you forever, I, dead, may live;
possessing you, I, poor, be always rich and richer than kings;
I who, eating and drinking of you and dressing myself in you at every moment, pass from delight to delight to inexpressible goods,
because you are every good and every glory and every delight,
and it is to you that the glory belongs, O holy, consubstantial and life-giving Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (…) now and ever and unto ages of ages.
Amen.”
[End, Cardinal Gugerotti’s homily]
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Here is a Vatican News report on the homily:
Cardinal Gugerotti: Eastern brothers and sisters enrich Church’s universality (link)
By Vatican News
Friday, May 2, 2025
Still at the beginning of the Easter season, Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti reflected on faith in the resurrection, especially in light of the passing of Pope Francis on Easter Monday.
During the seventh Novemdiales Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Cardinal underlined that the resurrection is “not a phenomenon inherent to human nature”; rather, it comes from God “through His Spirit.”
It is through this same Spirit, he stressed that humanity becomes adopted children of God, who cry out to Him: “Abba, Father” with all of creation.
Despite this, “creation and the human person seem to hold so little value today”, the Cardinal emphasized. And yet, there remains an interconnectedness between humanity and nature.
Creation, he pointed out, is “a companion on humanity’s journey, in solidarity with us and seeking our solidarity in return,” and this was a theme very dear to Pope Francis.
Fraternity between the Eastern and Western Churches
At the heart of his homily, the Cardinal, Prefect Emeritus of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, reflected on the richness of the Eastern Christian spirituality.
United in the Mass despite our differences, he recalled their history rooted in the earliest days of Christianity, in “the fragrance of the Lord’s land.”
St. Peter’s Basilica was filled with many members of the Eastern Catholic Churches for the Eucharistic celebration, and in their presence, the Cardinal expressed his gratitude for their acceptance of “the invitation to enrich the Church’s universality” through their experiences, cultures, and spirituality.
As Cardinal Gugerotti noted, “at times in history, we in the West failed to understand” our brothers and sisters in the East.
The seventh Novemdiales Mass where hymns and readings were led by members of the Eastern Churches, “Pope Francis, who taught us to love the diversity and richness of human expression, surely rejoices today to see us united in prayer for him and with him.”
The Cardinal offered the Mass as a moment to recommit ourselves to welcome and help our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Churches persevere in their faith, “especially now, as so many of them are forced to flee their ancient homelands, which were the Holy Land.”
To close his reflection, he urged his fellow Cardinals to recite the prayer of an Eastern father, St. Symeon the New Theologian, ahead of the upcoming conclave:
“Come, true light; come, eternal life; come, hidden mystery; come, nameless treasure; come, ineffable reality; come, inconceivable person; come, endless joy; come, light without evening; come, unfailing hope of all who are to be saved. Come, you who have always desired and desire my miserable soul…”
Here is a more complete report on the homily by Hannah Brockhaus of Catholic News Agency.
Cardinal commemorates martyrdom, persecution of Eastern Catholics faithful to pope (link)
Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, celebrates the seventh Novendiales Mass for Pope Francis on May 2, 2025, in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. | Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/EWTN News
Vatican City, May 2, 2025 / 17:14 pm
On the seventh day of the Novemdiales Masses for Pope Francis, Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti recalled the extreme sacrifice Catholics from the Eastern Catholic Churches have made to remain faithful to the successor of St. Peter, the Pope.
“In the past, Eastern Catholics have agreed to adhere to full communion with the successor of the Apostle Peter, whose body rests in this basilica. And it was in the name of this union that they bore witness, often in blood or persecution, to their faith,” Gugerotti said at a Mass on May 2 in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Eastern Catholics, “in part now reduced, in numbers and in strength but not in faith, from wars and intolerance,” he continued, “remain firmly clinging to a sense of catholicity that does not exclude but rather implies the recognition of their specificity.”
The 69-year-old Italian cardinal was head of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches since 2022 and had extensive experience serving as an apostolic nuncio to countries with many Eastern Catholics and Orthodox, including Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
In his homily at the Mass for Pope Francis’ repose, part of the Church’s nine days of mourning, Gugerotti pointed out how Eastern Catholics have “enriched the treasury of Christian theology with a contribution as original as it is, to a large extent, unknown by us Westerners.”
He noted that some members and leaders of the Eastern Catholic Churches were present at the Mass and thanked them for “agreeing to enrich the catholicity of the Church with the variety of their experiences, their cultures, but above all their very rich spirituality.”
“Children of the beginnings of Christianity, they have carried in their hearts, together with their Orthodox brothers and sisters, the flavor of the Lord’s land, and some even continue to speak the language that Jesus Christ spoke,” he said.
Gugerotti said he believes Pope Francis, “who taught us to love the diversity and richness of expression of all that is human,” is rejoicing to see Catholics of different rites joining together in prayer.
The cardinal also called on Catholics everywhere to recommit themselves to helping Christians forced to leave their ancient homelands, such as those in the Holy Land.
We should “sensitize ourselves, as our pope had wished, to welcome them and help them in our lands to preserve the specificity of their Christian contribution, which is an integral part of our being the Catholic Church,” he underlined.
Gugerotti invited those present at Mass to unite themselves to the Eucharist, “even in our aridities, distractions, continuous loss of focus on the only thing necessary.”
He ended his homily with a prayer to the Holy Spirit, written by St. Simeon the New Theologian, an Eastern Father of the Church, and addressing his brother cardinals said: “As the days become ever closer when we will be called upon to choose the new pope, let us place on our lips the invocation of the Holy Spirit.”
“Come, true light; come, eternal life; come, hidden mystery; come, nameless treasure; come, ineffable reality; come, inconceivable person; come, happiness without end; come, light without sunset; come, infallible expectation of all who are to be saved. Come, you who has longed and longs for my miserable soul. Come, thou, the one, to me, alone, for thou seest that I am alone; that seeing thee in eternity I, dead, may live; possessing thee, I, poor, may ever be rich and richer than kings; I, who eating and drinking of thee, and clothing myself at all times with thee, pass from delight to delight to inexpressible goods, for thou art all good and all glory and all delight, and it is to thee that glory belongs, O holy, consubstantial, and life-giving Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.”
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