Leo XIV celebrates a year of pontificate in Pompeii: 'I the first blessed'

"What a beautiful day, how many blessings, I feel the first blessed to be able to come here, to the shrine on the day of supplication and this anniversary". These are the words spoken by Pope Leo, referring both to the shrine of Pompeii and to his first anniversary of pontificate. On 8 May last year, as soon as he was elected, introducing himself to the world from the Loggia of Blessings at St Peter's, Leo had evoked the very day of the supplication written by Bartolo Longo that falls on 8 May.

Leo arrived by helicopter in the meeting area of the Shrine of Pompeii where he is making a pastoral visit that will also touch Naples in the afternoon on the first anniversary of his pontificate. Leo XIV reached the Luisa Trapani Hall of the meeting area on foot, where he met the "Temple of Charity", a reality that welcomes people from situations of hardship. Before addressing greetings and speeches, he greeted one by one the sick and disabled.

In his first speech in Pompeii, evoking the figure of the founder of the city and of the shrine, that Bartolo Longo whom he canonised on 19 October in St Peter's Square, Leo XIV said: 'When St Bartolo first came to the Valley of Pompeii, he found there a land afflicted by so much misery, inhabited by a few very poor peasants, afflicted by malaria and by brigands. He was able, however, to see the face of Christ in everyone: in the great and the small, and especially in the orphans and the children of the imprisoned, to whom he made them feel, with his tenderness, the beating of God's heart. To those who then told him that his young people were destined to the same fate as their parents, he replied that love can drive even the most difficult children to goodness and that, in every field of action, only charity ensures certain, great and definitive victories." Pope Leo