"An Ark of Hope"

On Sunday, March 2, in the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia, Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, Archbishop of Marseille in charge of Mediterranean coordination, gave the homily. Read it here in full. 

" Siblings,

What a joy to be gathered today under the vaults of this basilica, a magnificent poem of stone and light to the glory of God! If the Archbishop of Marseille joins you there and celebrates with you the Eucharist of the Lord, at the invitation of dear Cardinal Omella, Archbishop of Barcelona, it is because an exceptional event unites our two cities and, through them, all our brothers and sisters of the Mediterranean. Tomorrow, from the docks of Barcelona, the school boat will set off Beautiful Hope : for eight months of a long odyssey, it will crisscross the shores of the Mediterranean with, on board, young people from all the countries bordering it, whatever their origin and religion, to live an experience of fraternity and training for peace. When, next October, the ship, God willing, docks in Marseille, the end of its pilgrimage, nearly 200 young people will have been able to let the Spirit change their hearts, awaken ours and those of all those they have been able to meet on their route, from Barcelona to Tetouan, from Palermo to Bizerte, from the island of Malta to that of Crete, from Cyprus to Lebanon, from Istanbul to Athens, then along the coasts of the Adriatic, and finally from Naples to Marseille.

We need peace in the Mediterranean, especially in these days when international tensions are growing and the noise of weapons is more and more threatening. The thirst for power and profit on the part of a few irresponsible leaders is causing humanity to run terrible dangers, with contempt for individuals and peoples, especially the poorest and most destitute. Because those who start wars are rarely those who die from them! And we, who are going to launch the Bel Espoir tomorrow, might think that such a small ship on the stormy sea of history, with such challenges and such heartbreaks, is very little! And yet, brothers and sisters, everything in this Basilica of the Holy Family, the Sagrada Familia, reminds us that the Lord chose to save us by becoming a little child, tossed about by history, chased away by the powerful, a member of a Holy Family forced to flee to Egypt, like so many migrants today, fleeing the poverty, war and corruption that ravage their countries of origin. But God does not abandon those who trust in Him. The Child grew up, his Word, his message, his actions, then his condemnation, his death and his resurrection have worked the world like a leaven, a small seed that matures and grows, an almost nothing that changes everything. And this morning, in Barcelona, coming from many countries of the world to share the hope that his call has given us, we are here to bear witness to it.

Hope is not a vague optimism: it is a choice, demanding, and even heroic. A great French novelist, Georges Bernanos, who enlisted during the Spanish Civil War and stayed in Barcelona during the summer of 1936, in a period that was also very troubled internationally, wrote these powerful sentences that I offer for your meditation:

“Hope is a heroic determination of the soul, and its highest form is despair overcome. It is believed that it is easy to hope. But only those who have had the courage to despair of the illusions and lies in which they found a security that they falsely take for hope hope. Hope is a risk to be run, it is even the risk of risks. Hope is the greatest and most difficult victory that a man can win over his soul… We only reach hope through truth, at the cost of great efforts. To encounter hope, we must have gone beyond despair. When we go to the end of the night, we encounter another dawn. The demon in our heart is called "What's the point?"

This risk of hope is the one that you have taken, you, young people of the Mediterranean who are committing yourselves to this odyssey. You do not know each other, you know that, on a boat, one has no other choice than to be united, you have different convictions and even religions, but you have decided to take together the risk of meeting, driven as you are by the same desire to serve peace, to promote justice and to help your peoples to live happily and in harmony on the shores of this sea, which will always be too wide to confuse and too narrow to separate.

This morning, at the school of Gaudi, who wanted to give this basilica the powerful breath of the Gospel, we remember that, for Christians, hope is like an anchor cast beyond history, in the victory that Christ has definitively won over evil and death. To live in hope is to look at the world, despite all the storms of life, in the light of the promise that the Lord has made to us: " I am with you always until the end of time! ". What then should we be afraid of? Let us not let the beams blind our eyes and distort our judgment, let us not let discouragement and indifference anesthetize our indignation and cool our hearts. God expects us not to be lukewarm, but full of enthusiasm and courage, attentive to others, fraternal and available, in order to know how to read the signs, often discreet, of grace and salvation in our own lives and all around us. The ship that we are going to push on the waves, a small walnut shell on the waves of the storms and tears of our sea and our world, is intended to be an ark of hope of which you, the young people who will embark at each stage of this great odyssey, will become the navigators. And I am sure that the compass of this navigation will help you to find the right path and to keep the right course throughout your life.

And this applies to all of us, brothers and sisters, whatever stage we are at in the great journey of life. A life is the time that God gives us to prepare for his encounter. Let us reject the demon of "What's the point?", which blinds us and makes us indifferent to our fellow travelers. Every man, every woman, is a brother, a sister, for whom Christ died, for whom he rose again. Let us learn hope. Let us live fraternity. Let us cultivate friendship and trust. Let us bear witness to the love with which God loves the world, he who wants to gather together in unity his scattered children. Then our sea will be able to become more and more what it has always been intended to be: a link, a road and a door between peoples and civilizations. This is the message that Pope Francis has never ceased to repeat, in season and out of season, from Lampedusa to Jerusalem, from Lesbos to Tirana, and on so many other fault lines of today's humanity that he has chosen to visit. May his pilgrimage inspire ours, so that we may become pilgrims of hope on the paths of our lives.

Amen!