VATICAN CITY (CNS) – As the Catholic Church elects a new pope, a cardinal reminded his fellow electors that true Christian leadership begins not in control, but in surrender to mystery.
“We so often feel like masters of God, perfect knowers of the truth, while we are only pilgrims to whom the Word has been given,” said Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, former prefect of Dicastery for Eastern Churches, during a memorial Mass for Pope Francis May 2.
In his homily, the Italian cardinal warned against reducing God to human categories, pointing to the idea deeply rooted in Eastern Christianity that God is ultimately beyond comprehension. “Contemplation of the incomprehensible,” he said, reminds believers that even the greatest theologians – like St. Thomas Aquinas in the West – could speak only of what God is not, rather than define what God is.
Cardinal Gugerotti celebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica with cardinals and representatives from the Eastern Churches on the seventh day of the “novendiali” — nine days of mourning for Pope Francis marked by Masses.
Calling on the church to remain attentive to the cries of creation and of suffering humanity, Cardinal Gugerotti lamented that “creation and the human person seem to have so little value today.”
Some parts of the church however, such as in Africa, are attentive to the beauty of creation around them, “because new life is for their peoples an inestimable value.”
He described creation as a “companion on the journey of humanity” and recalled how Pope Francis often insisted that caring for the earth and for the poor are inseparable tasks. Creation “asks for solidarity from the human race,” the cardinal said, “so that it may be respected and healed.”
Reflecting on the legacy of Pope Francis, he said the late pope “taught us to gather the cry of violated life, to assume it and present it to the Father, but also to work to concretely alleviate the pain that this cry evokes.”
At times, he said, a wounded humanity struggles even to voice its need for God.
“This desperate humanity, in its cry, finds it difficult to express prayer and invocation to the God of life,” the cardinal said. In such moments, the Holy Spirit gives voice to what the human heart cannot articulate, transforming “our rocky silences and unexpressed tears into an invocation to our God with inexpressible groanings.”
Cardinal Gugerotti said this interior prayer – silent but powerful – must guide the church through its mourning and discernment. “In this Eucharist we intend to join, as we can and know how, the inexpressible groaning of the Spirit that cries out to God what is pleasing to him,” he said.
The cardinal also praised the witness of Eastern Catholic communities present at the Mass, many of whom have faced persecution, war or exile. Though diminished in number, he said, “they remain firmly attached to a sense of catholicity that does not exclude but indeed implies the recognition of their specificity.”
Their liturgical and spiritual traditions, he noted, “enrich the church with the variety of their experiences, their cultures, but above all their very rich spirituality.”
As the cardinals prepare to enter the conclave May 7, Cardinal Gugerotti closed his homily by invoking the Holy Spirit through a 10th-century Eastern prayer by St. Symeon the New Theologian:
“Come, true light; come, eternal life; come, hidden mystery … so that, seeing you forever I, who am dead, may live.”