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Juan Luis Tron (second from left) and Maria Magdalene Baca (second from right) together with other young people from the Regnum Christi movement wait outside St. Peter’s Basilica on Jan. 2, 2023, to pay their respects to the late Pope Benedict XVI, who died Dec. 31, 2022. / Hannah Brockhaus / CNA

Vatican City, Jan 2, 2023 / 11:00 am (CNA).

Approximately 40,000 people visited Benedict XVI in the first five hours he was lying in state on Monday, according to the Vatican gendarmes.

Catholics have traveled to the Vatican from both near and far to see the late pope for the last time and to pray for his eternal repose.

The Herrera family traveled from Madrid, Spain, after learning that Benedict XVI had died on Dec. 31. They arrived in Rome late on Jan. 1 and joined the line of mourners the next morning.

Maria Jimenez told CNA she and her husband and four children, ages 19–25, “came especially to see the pope, to pray for him and to see him. To say goodbye, too.”

“We love Benedict,” she said, adding that she thinks he will one day be a saint.

Here are a few of the people who said goodbye to Benedict on Jan. 2:

Giancarlo Rossi, who lives in Rome, told CNA he got in line to enter St. Peter’s Basilica at 7:45 a.m.

He prayed the rosary while he waited to pay his final respects to Benedict.

“I met him a few times — I am from here. And so I came to greet the pope for the last time,” he told CNA. “And I am praying for him. I offered my Mass for him and I will ask for a plenary indulgence for him, as well.”

Gabriella Fedele, also from Rome, said she felt that Benedict XVI was a great and humble leader of the Church.

She told CNA his death is “a great sorrow, because a light is extinguished on this earth, but yet one is lit up in heaven.”

Sister Angel Bilegu, a consecrated virgin in the Diocese of Rome, waited in line from before sunrise to see the pope emeritus, whose election as pope she remembers.

“I appreciated his magisterium a lot,” she said. “He was a pastor and a theologian, who really did theology ‘on his knees.’”

“I really liked him a lot and so I had to come to say goodbye.”

Carmen Floriani and her husband, Hans Schudel, came to Rome with their three young children from Switzerland. Schudel waited in line from 6 a.m., while Floriani joined with their children — ages 5 months, 3, and 5 years — later in the morning.

Floriani, who is originally from Trento in the far northern part of Italy, told CNA her family came to see Benedict XVI “because he was our pope for some years,” but also because she and her husband, married six years, have a special connection to the Bavarian pope.

“The witness at our marriage is [former Cardinal] Ratzinger’s relative,” she said. “I studied in Munich, in Bavaria, and there I met the only members of his family still there. This is another reason for coming to say goodbye to him.”

A group of teens, members of the international lay movement Regnum Christi, also lined up early on Monday morning.

They said they were in Rome from Mexico, Spain, Germany, Philippines, and Italy for a gathering of 120 members of the movement.

Maria Magdalena Baca, 17, said: “We are pretty young and maybe we don’t remember much of him as pope. But I remember when he came to Mexico and my parents talked to me about him as a pope.”

“I believe that we should be thankful, too,for his life,” 18-year-old Juan Luis Tron, from Mexico City, told CNA. “He was a pope that I admired so much. We have been talking about his life and many consecrated [women of Regnum Christi] and priests [of the Legionaries of Christ] have said, even though it’s sad, the notice that he has passed away, we should be thankful for his life and for all the things he built in the Church.”

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Cardinal José Luis Lacunza resigned as bishop of the Diocese of David in Panama Feb. 15, 2024, two weeks after his disappearance that has not yet been explained. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/ACI Prensa

ACI Prensa Staff, Feb 15, 2024 / 17:30 pm (CNA)… […]

Pope Francis praying at the general audience on St. Peter’s Square / Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

Rome Newsroom, Nov 23, 2022 / 02:37 am (CNA).

Pope Francis used the example of several Catholic saints to explain the concept of spiritual consolation during his weekly audience on Wednesday.

“What is spiritual consolation?” he said Nov. 23. “It is a profound experience of interior joy, consisting in seeing God’s presence in everything. It strengthens faith and hope, and even the ability of doing good.”

The pope continued his teachings on the theme of discernment at his public audience in St. Peter’s Square, where he contrasted last week’s reflection on spiritual desolation with consolation, as experienced by several of the Church’s saints.

“The person who experiences consolation never gives up in the face of difficulties because he or she always experiences a peace that is stronger than any trial,” Francis said. Consolation “is, therefore, a tremendous gift for the spiritual life as well as life in general.”

The pope began his explanation by drawing from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who wrote about rules for the discernment of spirits.

Francis said “consolation is an interior movement that touches our depths. It is not flashy but soft, delicate, like a drop of water on a sponge.”

He went on to describe consolation as not “a passing euphoria,” nor something which tries to force our will or inhibit our freedom. “Even the suffering caused, for example, by our own sins can become a reason for consolation,” he added.

St. Augustine was consoled when he spoke with his mother, St. Monica, about the beauty of eternal life, the pope said. And St. Francis of Assisi experienced perfect joy despite the difficult situations he had to bear.

“Let’s think of the many saints who were able to do great things not because they thought they were magnificent or capable, but because they had been conquered by the peaceful

sweetness of God’s love,” Pope Francis said. “This is the peace that St. Ignatius discovered in himself with such amazement when he would read the lives of the saints.”

The pope also quoted St. Edith Stein, who is also known by the name she took in religious life: Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

A year after her baptism as a Christian, following her conversion from Judaism, St. Edith Stein wrote about her interior feeling of peace: “As I abandon myself to this feeling, little by little a new life begins to fill me and — without any pressure on my will — to drive me toward new realizations. This living inpouring seems to spring from an activity and it gives a strength that is not mine and which, without doing me any violence, becomes active in me.”

Francis emphasized the importance of action following consolation.

“Consolation is such peace, but not to sit there enjoying it, no, it gives you peace and draws you to the Lord and sets you on a path to do things, to do good things,” he said.

“In a time of consolation, when we are consoled, we get the desire to do so much good, always. Instead, when there is a time of desolation, we get the urge to close in on ourselves and do nothing. Consolation pushes you forward, in service to others, to society, to people.”

He recalled when St. Therese of the Child Jesus, at the age of 14, visited the Basilica of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome.

The girl from Lisieux, France, “tried to touch the nail venerated there, one of the nails with which Jesus was crucified,” the pope said. “Therese understood her daring as a transport of love and confidence. Later, she wrote, ‘I truly was too audacious. But the Lord sees the depths of our hearts. He knows my intention was pure […] I acted with him as a child who believes everything is permissible and who considers the Father’s treasures their own.’”

This, Pope Francis said, is a “splendid description of spiritual consolation.”

“We can feel a sense of tenderness toward God that makes us audacious in our desire to participate in his own life, to do what is pleasing to him because we feel familiar with him, we feel that his house is our house, we feel welcome, loved, restored,” he added.

Consolation gives one the strength to continue in the face of difficulty, Francis said, pointing to St. Therese’s request to the pope to enter the Carmelite order even though she was too young.

According to the pope, St. Bernard teaches us about consolation and discernment, especially the pitfall of “false consolations.”

“If an authentic consolation is like a drop on a sponge, is soft and intimate, its imitations are noisier and flashier, like straw fires, lacking substance, leading us to close in on ourselves and not to take care of others,” Francis said. This is where discernment comes in.

“False consolation can become a danger if we seek it obsessively as an end in itself, forgetting the Lord,” he pointed out. “As St. Bernard would say, this is like seeking the consolations of God rather than the God of consolations.”

There is a risk of treating our relationship with God in a childish way, he concluded, “of reducing it to an object that we use and consume, losing the most beautiful gift which is God himself.”

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