Pope Francis yesterday visited the Mediterranean island of Corsica and encouraged the island’s Catholic majority to foster its traditional piety as secular culture grows in Europe. Source: CNA.
The papal visit to the capital Ajaccio touched the peripheries of France, where a strongly Catholic population is steeped in Corsican traditions, including songs, both sacred and secular, linked to confraternities.
These religious associations, which have a long history in Corsican culture, continue to pass down the custom of singing. The hymns are usually sung a capella and in Latin.
Traditional Corsican hymns featured throughout Pope Francis’ visit, especially at his Mass with an estimated 7000 Catholics at Place d’Austerlitz, a park built as a memorial to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who was born in Ajaccio. Authorities estimate another 8000 people were following the Mass on jumbo screens around the city.
In his homily for the Third Sunday of Advent, Pope Francis said too much time thinking about ourselves and our own needs is why “we lose the spirit of joy.”
Distress, disappointment, and sadness are widespread spiritual ills, he noted, especially where consumerism is prominent.
“If we live only for ourselves, we will never find happiness,” the Pope said, pointing to the recitation of the Rosary and the spiritual and corporal works of mercy of the confraternities as an example of how to cultivate faith.
Pope Francis is the first pope to visit Corsica, which is situated west of the mainland of Italy and north of the Italian island of Sardinia, the nearest land mass.
Approximately 400 people, many of them members of confraternities, were in the auditorium for Pope Francis’ first meeting of the day, the closing speech of a conference on popular piety in the Mediterranean region.
Francis warned against pitting Christian and secular culture against one another, and praised the “beauty and importance of popular piety” in an increasingly faithless Europe.
Pope Francis greeted enthusiastic locals lining the streets of Ajaccio as he travelled in an open-air popemobile to the 16th-century Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral, where he met with clergy and religious men and women.
After a day surrounded by the warmth of the people of Corsica, Pope Francis concluded his trip with a brief one-on-one meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, before returning to Rome.
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Pope Francis praises faith of Catholics in French Corsica (By Hannah Brockhaus, CNA)
