Pope Leo XIV led the Regina Caeli prayer with pilgrims and tourists gathered in St Peter’s Square on Easter Monday and prayed for his predecessor Francis, who died on Easter Monday of last year after a long battle with respiratory illness. Source: Crux.
“With particular affection, in the light of the risen Lord, we remember today Pope Francis, who, on Easter Monday of last year, returned to the Lord,” Leo said in his Regina Caeli address.
Recalling what he said was Francis’s “profound witness of faith and love,” Leo asked faithful to pray together, “that we may become ever more radiant heralds of the truth”.
Easter Monday is also called lunedi dell’Angelo, or “Angel Monday” in Italy, and is recognised as an official public holiday in scores of predominantly Christian countries around the world.
During the Easter liturgical season, the Pope recites the traditional Marian Regina Caeli (coeli) prayer instead of the Angelus on Sundays and special holidays, including Pasquetta.
In his address on Monday, Pope Leo focused on the day’s Gospel reading, in which Mary Magdalene meets the risen Jesus while running to announce his resurrection to the disciples, as well as efforts by the leaders of the Sanhedrin to bribe the guards at Jesus’s tomb into saying he had not risen, but that his body had been stolen.
From this one fact, Jesus’s rising from the dead, two narratives are spread, “one a source of new and eternal life, the other of certain and definitive death,” Leo said.
“This contrast invites us to reflect on the value of Christian witness and the integrity of human communication,” he said, lamenting that the proclamation of the truth is often “obscured by what we today call ‘fake news’ — lies, insinuations, and unfounded accusations.”
However, in the midst of this web of often conflicting information, “the truth does not remain hidden; rather, it comes forth to meet us, living and radiant, illuminating even the deepest darkness,” he said.
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Leo honors Francis at Regina Caeli, stresses importance of truth v ‘fake news’ (By Elise Ann Allen, Crux)
