Papal preacher says Christ's passion is call for forgiveness

Published: 2004-04-12

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Christ's passion is a call to respond to violence not with revenge but with forgiveness, said the preacher of the papal household. In his sermon April 9 during the pope's Good Friday Liturgy of the Lord's Passion, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa said Jesus overcame violence "not by confronting it with a greater violence, but by undergoing it, revealing the naked reality of all its injustice and futility." Pope John Paul II presided over the solemn liturgy in St. Peter's Basilica; the liturgy included veneration of the cross. The papal household's preacher traditionally delivers the sermon. Father Cantalamessa said the passion of Christ "has a special message for the times which we are living. The message is: No to violence." The violence that "assails and scandalizes us today" in "new and fearsome forms, senseless and cruel ... invades those areas that ought to be a remedy for violence: sport, art, family life," he said.

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