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The mission of the Bishop does not consist solely of preaching the Gospel,
of announcing the Word, but also lies in materially helping the faithful who
are entrusted to him to live this announcement. Precisely because he must,
as far as he is able, materially help the faithful to embody the Gospel in
their everyday lives, I believe that he has the duty to talk about the way
in which he has faced illness and about the way in which illness can be faced,
because illness is an integrating part of human life. If we left
illness outside of life, we would not be sincere, we would not
be covering the whole of human existence; indeed we
would not be covering an essential part of our human experience.
Our society, on the other hand, tends to extrapolate
illness outside the context of social life because,
while a great deal is done to help people to overcome
illness, at the same time we censor it. Nobody in fact
gladly talks about being in poor health and the main
value of life is often is placed in the health that a
person enjoys. "Health above all else"; "the most
important thing is to be healthy": these are
statements that are constantly expressed not only amongst
men, but also amongst those who believe in Jesus Christ. The
supreme value of life is often identified as the enjoyment
of good health. Health is certainly an important condition
for being able to do many things that we must achieve in
life, but it is not the basic presupposition for our life to
truly have value. Even people who suffer, who have to cope
with serious illness, who are ill for the whole of their
lives, can enjoy a beautiful human experience and can give
their existence an inestimable value. If well lived, illness
can often give life a greater value than health itself can give.
This is the reason why I accepted the invitation of
Caritas, who I thank for having had this idea of inviting me
to talk about my experience, but mainly because they are
trying to help everyone suffering from serious illness.
I thank Caritas, because perhaps only Caritas, being a
reflection of what the Church must do in society, could
conceive the idea of asking a Bishop to speak in public
about his illness. It is not possible to talk on
"Controluce" every week, it perhaps can be done only once
in a lifetime, but I still want to get back to the issue,
albeit in other terms, inasmuch as not prompted by any
question, because I am convinced that I can help those of
you who are ill and also those of you who are healthy,
even though you are not in the right condition to be able
to understand what the value of illness is, to live your
life in such a profound way that it gives value to
physical suffering, too.
Healthy people have difficulty in understanding and this
was my own personal experience, too, before I became ill.
I almost never considered the problem of suffering
through illness. And I do not think I have not understood
a lot about illness, reading simply texts or books on the
subject. Because it is only the attention that we pay to
the experience that we are going through that really
enables us to understand the true essence of our life.
In fact, simply by living an experience with awareness, we
can always obtain from it an indication for our life.
Thinking back to a beautiful service that we perform
every year and that we have performed this year too,
I asked myself why our particular Church feels the need to
takes its sick to Lourdes. It is not a project, nor is it
even a simple gesture of charity, it is not simply to
help people to go there and pray to the Madonna for
spiritual or physical healing. I think that this gesture
by the Church to bring its sick together - and the Gospel
reminds us that this phenomenon began around the person
of Jesus - is prompted by a deeper need, that goes beyond
the need and the situation of each individual person, and
that is to show that, in the midst of Christian people,
in the experience of the Christian community, illness has
a prophetic value. By taking the sick to Lourdes, we want
to make manifest this function, this value of illness,
making public what illness really is. Because illness is
always a sign of death. It is in this that the prophetic
value of being ill lies. Everyone in fact, when struck by
an illness that could shortly lead to death, anticipates
life’s final moment, death: the most important moment in
a person’s life, in the passing from this life on earth
to future life. Illness appears among us as a sign and
reminder of what we shall all us have to face: the moment
of our death. We have to talk about this value, we have
to talk about it continually among us, because death is
the most important moment of our existence. Illness can
help us understand its importance, to understand how
great the moment of the end of our earthly life is.
It helps us in fact to realise in advance – hence its
prophetic character - our destiny and how much we need
“Another”, Someone greater than us. If lived well,
illness is the moment in a man’s life that more than any
other can teach and help him understand who he is, who
“God” is and how much greater is “God”.
In effect, because of the experience that I am going through, but
first of all because of what the Gospel reveals to us,
illness helps to realise whether we are truly willing, in
life, to do God’s will. At the end of his life in fact,
the real problem for a Christian is not, first of all, to
succeed in asking for the forgiveness of his sins or in
making even a general confession. The real problem that
remains to be solved, even though we confess our sins,
even though we receive the Sacrament of the Sick, is to
succeed in saying our “Yes” to the Lord, who calls us.
In the face of this, yes, we are afraid. In the course
of our life, it is not easy to really say “Yes” to God,
without resorting to subterfuges. We say it a thousand
times a day, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but we often
and generally live with mental reservations. We say
"Yes" to God, but we also say yes to our own plans, our
own wishes. Rather than pray to God for his will to be
done, we beseech him to accommodate our own requests,
to do our will. There is nothing wrong in this: in fact
we can ask God to do what we would like to be done, but
in the knowledge that the most important thing is none
the less for God’s will to be done. The problem with
death is knowing how to face it, saying “Yes” to God,
saying: "I am willing to come". It may appear simple,
but in actual fact it is very difficult. And illness
prepares us, because in suffering illness we find
ourselves in almost the same situation as death. This
is why it is more important to die through illness,
than to die a sudden and unexpected death. Lots of
people think that the best way to go is to die
suddenly, so as not to suffer, so as not to be
aware of what it is happening, so as not to cause
disturbance to anybody. But this is a line of thought that
a Christian should not follow, because illness helps us
prepare for death: be it an illness that places us close to
death or one where death is still relatively far away, but
one that none the less contains the “germ” of death.
An unexpected death is not something we should hope and wish
for, because suffering helps us to prepare ourselves, to
present ourselves to the Lord, to follow the Lord who is
calling us. This is what we must all wish for: to be ready
to say our “Yes” to God. Before my first serious operation,
I was visiting a lady at a hospital in Lugano one day and I
realized that this lady, although she had always attended
the religious services in the cathedral, was faithful,
assiduous and dedicated to prayer, was unable to accept the
fact of having to die. I went to visit her to try and help
her realise that the essential thing in her situation was
to accept this call to God, however premature it might
seem. I thought about this a lot until, having fallen too
ill, I understood how this lady, even though she was a good
Christian, might not accept the moment of death, because I
think that I myself have also experienced the same
temptations that she did. Death is the moment of temptation
and illness is prophetic, because it gives us a foretaste
of the temptations that death brings to us. These
temptations spring from our reason and grip all those
affected by serious illness, which can lead to death.
In fact, anyone who finds himself in this situation inevitably
asks himself: "Why me"; "What have I done wrong"; "I have
always tried to bring my children up in the right way, and
yet now I have to die"; "Where is the justice in that".
It is regarded as something unjust. Life appears to be a
swindle, a promise of something which then ends in a way
that apparently does not contain any promise, that no
longer fulfils any promise, until the person thinks that it
is better not to live, than to die like this. These are the
temptations that beset people who are close to death;
in sick people, in people who are aware that they could die.
They feel the force of these objections which are
apparently raised by our reason and they rebel. I realised
that that lady was going through an experience that was not
peculiar to her, but that first of all had become my own
experience and is probably everyone’s experience.
A rebellion against death, a moment that in certain cases
arrives sooner because of illness, a rebellion felt by
Jesus too, because he lived the whole human experience.
He went through everything that a man can experience and
endure in his existence. In the very face of death Jesus
underwent the deepest experience we can imagine, when he
sweated blood in the garden of “Gethsemane”. In the midst
of all the atrocities that we see happening today, we have
never heard of people who sweat blood when faced with
death. And yet Jesus, says the Gospel, sweated blood.
It means that his fear in the face of death almost went beyond
the bounds of human expression. It means that he truly was
afraid of disappearing into nothing, of being encased in a
tomb that is closed, never again to be opened, taking away
our personal life without leaving a trace. On the cross God
he screamed out the words of a psalm from the Old Testament:
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?",
words of desperation that then dissolve into feelings of
hope, of trust in God. On the cross he expressed the first
part of this experience, that the Hebrew people had given a
formal tone and poetic style to. "My God, My God, why have
you forsaken me". We experience the same feelings. In the
face of death we, too, have the impression of having been
forsaken by God. We do not sweat blood, because in our
person we do not contain the whole strength of humanity
present in Jesus, who embodied the experience of everyone
of us. His experience was more precise, deeper and more
painful than ours is. Not only does each one of us,
therefore, feel the temptation of avoiding God’s will,
struggle to adjust our own life when called by God and to
truly say an unreserved and totally honest "yes" to him;
Jesus Christ went through the same experience.
This consoles us, helps us, helps us realise that we must
not despair, because, in the same way that Christ was able
to get through this trial by asking his Father to do his
will, i.e. his Father’s will and not his own, we too can do it.
We too shall have the strength, we too shall have the
grace to ask the Father to do his, rather than our own
will. What was possible in Jesus Christ, is possible for us
too. However, we must not reach this moment unprepared,
otherwise it becomes very difficult.
Illness is not only a prophetic moment, a moment that
brings forward the final moment; it is not only the moment
when we, just like Jesus did, feel the temptation to rebel
against God, but it is also a grace. To say that illness is
a grace is very difficult. I too perhaps might never have
been able to say this. Saying that illness is a grace
offends our common sense, apparently goes against our
reason. If, however, we examine what happens during the
course of an illness, we realise that it is true, that
illness is a grace. We are all afraid or would be afraid of
making this assertion to another person and yet it is
profoundly true. Because, looking closely at what happens
in us during our illness, at what the illness does to us,
if we live all this in a Christian way, we realise that an
enormous change takes place. From when the illness started
to afterwards, we feel that we have undergone a deep
change, we are not the same people we were before: this is
the grace. Therefore it is true that illness is a grace.
But we can only say this afterwards. If we say it before,
it is as though it were too early, it is as though it were
an ideology. It is instead only on the basis of the
experience that we have gone through, which I myself have
undoubtedly gone through to some degree, that we can say
that illness is a grace. And we must know how to live it as
a grace. Because illness changes our relationship with God,
we certainly come close to him, we pray more, even though
it be only to ask him to help make us better:
a legitimately biased prayer.
Illness causes us to feel the time that we are living in a
different way than before. We realise that life is
something extremely precious, that it is the greatest gift
that we have received from God. We discover that time has a
different intensity compared to before, no longer in
relation to all the things that we have to do, but with
regard to the existential experience of our person. We feel
that time is precious, because time is pressing, because we
no longer have the chance of wasting, like we did before.
Time becomes more substantial, something that we would like
to live as intensely as possible.
Illness changes us, because it makes us touch with our own
hands the loneliness that we have inside us. There are in
fact moments during the illness when a person realises that
in the final analysis the issue is only his. Nobody can
take his place. Nobody can do or say anything in his place.
He feels his own finiteness and he realises that only one
Person can fill this finiteness, because this person is
someone greater than him: it is The One who gave us life.
We discover that loneliness cannot be overcome within the
human experience; we cannot overcome personal loneliness in
any situation of our life. Whether we get married, or
become God’s ministers, or consecrate our lives to God,
there is a point of our life in which we are always alone
before God and no one from the outside can help us by
taking our taking place. This drives us, opens the door in
us to the discovery of the fact that only God can fill the
human loneliness that we have inside us. These few things
should suffice to bring us to the realisation, afterwards,
that illness truly is a grace. Said at the beginning, it
can seem totally untrue or absurd, but the analysis of what
happens within our person shows that the statement that
illness is a grace is profoundly true.
There is however one condition that I have left as a final
thought. Everything that I have said comes true for us,
only if we succeed in accepting the illness. The most
important thing that we have to do, our own first attitude
towards the sick, is to personally accept what happens to
us and help others to do the same. We must help the sick to
accept their situation.
"Anyone who loves his father, his mother, his brothers and
sisters ...", this statement by Jesus in the Gospel, where
moreover he does not intend to be exhaustive in the
examples he gives, helps this reflection of ours. Jesus
states in fact that anyone who loves someone or something
"more than me, is not worthy of me". So, if we love health
as a supreme value, we are not worthy of Jesus Christ. We
must therefore learn to accept in our hearts, without
pretence, without subterfuges – subterfuge is the subtlest
temptation – truly succeeding in standing before God in all
sincerity.
Accepting the illness is the condition whereby it can
become a prophetic sign, a moment in which we overcome the
temptations that we experience throughout our lives,
whereby we can realise that it is a grace, inasmuch as it
changes us inwardly. Acceptance is the presupposition that
we must have within us, that the Lord can give us as a
grace, because on our own we cannot fully realize it.
The first thing that we must do when we are ill is to
accept our station before God, so as to allow this new
situation of our existence to manifest all the beneficial
effects, all the beneficial consequences, which the world
may perhaps not share. I just wanted to say this to you and
what I have told to you I have experienced, I did not
simply think it. I have probably thought of lots of things
but if I have thought them it is because God has given me
the grace to accept, I hope, my illness. And if I have
thought, it is because I have tried to live what has
happened to me in a certain way, which is exactly the same
thing that could happen to anyone else.
That is the reason why Caritas did a good thing in inviting
me to talk about this experience, which has become, to some
extent, a message about illness, a message that is however
closely linked to that experience that God has granted I
should undergo.
Saying that I thank God for this is not easy, because it is
like saying to God that I thank him for having taken away
from us something fundamental: our health. It is not easy
for me, it is not easy for anyone, it is not easy for the
Pope, because we are touching the most sensitive, truest
and most vital point of our whole human experience, that of
being truly sincere before the Lord, when we say things
about Him and about ourselves in relation to him.