Pope Benedict XVI celebrated an Easter Mass before thousands of faithful in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, meditating on death and rebirth just days after a devastating earthquake killed nearly 300 people in central Italy.
He also prayed for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians weeks before his first trip to the Holy Land as pontiff.
Church bells rang out across Rome as the pope, draped in golden vestments and surrounded by prelates in white and fuchsia robes, marked the most joyous day in the Catholic calendar, which celebrates Jesus’s resurrection.
“One of the questions that most preoccupies men and women is this: What is there after death?” the pope said, looking weary and sounding slightly hoarse. “To this mystery today’s solemnity allows us to respond that death does not have the last word, because life will be victorious at the end.”
The pope has said he will visit L’Aquila, in the mountainous Abruzzo region east of Rome, “as soon as possible” after Easter. Benedict offered the faithful “solidarity and courage” and prayed for them to have “the wisdom and courage to proceed united in the construction of a future open to hope.”
Benedict granted a special dispensation for a funeral Mass to be said for 205 of the 294 earthquake victims on Friday, which was Good Friday, the only day of the Catholic calendar in which Mass is not normally celebrated.
Many of the 28,000 people left homeless by the earthquake celebrated Easter in tent camps.
In his “urbi et orbi” message on Sunday, which comments on current events, Benedict said that “reconciliation — difficult, but indispensable — is a precondition for a future of overall security and peaceful coexistence” in the Middle East.
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