Francisco: Death is not the end of everything but a new start

Francisco

With passion, I read these pages born from the thought and affection of Angelo Scola, the dear brother in the episcopate and the person who provided sensitive services in the church, for example, after she was the president of the University of La Lars, then the Patriarch of the Venice and the head of the bishops in Milan. First, I would like to express my gratitude for this reflection, which combines personal experience and cultural sensitivity, as I rarely read. One, experience, lighting the other, culture; The second confirms the first. In this happy interlocking, life and culture opens with beauty.

Do not be fooled briefly this book: they are very dense pages, to read and re -read. I take Angelo’s reflections, some ideas that are especially in line with what made me experience me.

Angelo Scola tells us about old age, his old age, which writes with a touch of confidence that he is removing his weapon – “I am alive with a sudden acceleration and in many unexpected aspects.”

Already in choosing the word in which the “old” is defined, I find compatibility with the author. Yes, we should not be afraid of aging, we must not be afraid to embrace aging, because life is life and a local reality means betraying the truth of things. The return of pride to a term is often crazy is a gesture that we must be grateful to the Cardinal Scola. Because the saying of “the old” does not mean “throwing garbage”, as it sometimes leads to thinking about a deteriorating culture for use and throwing. The saying of the old man, on the other hand, means saying experience, wisdom, knowledge, discrimination, thinking, listening, and slow … the values ​​that we strongly need!

It is true that we are age, but this is not the problem: the problem is how to age. If you live this time of life as a grace, not to be upset; If we welcome the period of gratitude and recognition in this period (to the long) in which we face the decline in the forces, and the increasing fatigue from the body, the reactions are no longer the same as those of youth, just as aging also becomes a afternoon in life, as Romano Guardini taught us, truly proven and capable of radiation.

Angelo Scola highlights the human and social value of grandparents. I have repeatedly emphasized that the role of grandparents has a fundamental importance for the balanced development of young people, and in the end, for a more peaceful society, because their example, their words, can instill their wisdom in the smallest long -term vision, the memory of the past and the anchor in the values ​​that recently. In the madness of our societies, it is often delivered to a quick taste and bad manifestations, the wisdom of the ancestors becomes a beacon illuminating, illuminating uncertainty and giving guidance to grandchildren who can obtain “more than their experience in their daily lives.

The words that Angelo Scola dedicated to the subject of suffering, which often appears when we are old, and therefore, when we die, they are the jewels of faith and precious hope. In the arguments of this bishop brother, I listen to the echoes of Hans Urs von with the gastrics and Joseph Ratzinger, the theology “made of the knees”, suspicious of prayer and dialogue with the Lord. Therefore, the above said that these pages generated from the “thought and affection” of the Cardinal Scola: not only from thought, but also from the emotional dimension, which is what Christian faith refers to, as Christianity is not an intellectual work or an ethical choice, but the affection for the person, who came to meet us and decided to contact the spaces.

The same conclusion of these pages from Angelo Scola, who represent a sincere recognition of how to prepare it for the final confrontation with Jesus, gives us comfortable certainty: death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something. It is a new beginning, as the title is wisely, because the eternal life, which those who already love on Earth experience in professions every day, is the beginning of something that will not end. This is exactly why it is a “new” start, because we will test something that we have never tested completely: eternity.

Through these pages in my hands, I want perfectly to make the same gesture that barely covered the white habit of the Pope, in the Sistin Church: I embraced with great appreciation and affection for my brother Angelo, and now, both, older than March 2013. But always grateful to this loving God who offers life and hope at any age in our lives.

The Vatican City, February 7, 2025