Pope’s Blessing: Paralyzed Man’s Moving Encounter

It’s the second time Salvatore he left home after the accident during a judo competition which paralyzed him since he was 18 years old. The first was to go and see the sea, the second to receive a special caress. Wednesday morning, before the general audience in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis stopped by to hug him.

In catechesis with the faithful, Bergoglio focused precisely on care for the sick, pointing to Blessed Teresa of Calcutta as an example. Attending to the dying whose bodies were beginning to be gnawed by rats on the streets of Calcutta was considered “wasting time,” the pope said. Instead Mother Teresa cleaned them, took them home, prepared them for their final separation, “said goodbye to them”. And all these people, then, “were waiting for her at the gates of heaven”. She was not afraid to “hold the hand of those who were dying”, a work of mercy that everyone should do. The Pontiff, who will go on a pastoral visit to Albania on September 21st, where Mother Teresa was born and highly venerated, explained in the general audience the works of mercy, that is, how the Church teaches to concretely love people, gratuitously, not in the “logic of exchange and reciprocation”