Pope: fasting and prayer for peace on 22 August

"Next Friday, 22 August, we will celebrate the memory of the Blessed Virgin Mary Queen" who is "also invoked as Queen of Peace". The Pope said this at the end of the General Audience, launching an appeal: "As our land continues to be wounded by wars in the Holy Land, in Ukraine and in many other regions of the world, I invite all the faithful to live the day of 22 August in fasting and prayer, beseeching the Lord to grant us peace and justice and to dry the tears of those who suffer because of the armed conflicts taking place." "May Mary Queen of Peace intercede so that peoples may find the way to peace".

"I ask you to include in your intentions the supplication for the gift of peace - disarming and disarming - for the whole world, especially for Ukraine and the Middle East," Leo XIV said again at the general audience, in his greetings to the Polish-speaking faithful.

The Pontiff also returned to the subject of betrayals and indicated that there may be a way not to let resentment prevail. "How many relationships are broken, how many stories become complicated, how many unspoken words remain suspended. Yet, the Gospel shows us that there is always a way to continue to love, even when everything seems irretrievably compromised," he said in the general audience. "Forgiveness," he explained, "does not mean denying evil, but preventing it from generating more evil. It is not to say that nothing has happened, but to do everything possible so that resentment does not decide the future". "Forgiveness," he emphasised, "is revealed in all its power and manifests the concrete face of hope. It is not forgetfulness, it is not weakness. It is the capacity to leave the other person free, while loving him or her to the end". And again: "As Jesus teaches us, to love means to leave the other free, even to betray, without ever ceasing to believe that even that freedom, wounded and lost, can be wrenched from the deception of darkness and returned to the light of goodness".