Pope, 30,000 faithful at the Colosseum for the Way of the Cross: no more conflicts

This is an Easter eve for the Pope made of contacts, appeals, diplomatic phone calls. Yesterday Leo heard from the Israeli president Isaac Herzog again calling for an end to the conflict. There was also a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who invited him to Kiev, and together they wished for the achievement of "a just and lasting peace". The most important feast day for Christians, the Easter, will be celebrated in various parts of the world under the bombs, and Leo does not shy away from once again launching his warning to put an end to so much death and destruction. Words that also mark the traditional Way of the Cross at the Colosseum, Leone's first, in which there is all the dramatic topicality of these days: the wars, the massacres, the genocides, the mothers who mourn their children, the children whose childhood has been stolen.

"There are those who believe they have received authority without limits", reads the text prepared by Father Francesco Patton, the Franciscan former Custos of the Holy Land, but "every authority will have to answer before God for the way in which it exercises the power it has received", first and foremost "the power to start a war or to end it". Good Friday began with the rite of Passion in which Pope Leo, bareheaded, prostrated himself to the ground and then barefoot kissed the cross, as a sign of penitence but also to implore God for an end to injustice in the world.

The rite of the Way of the Cross, in the evening, was held as per tradition in the place symbolic of Christian martyrdom: the Colosseum. The ceremony was attended by almost 30 thousand faithful. And for the first time a Pontiff chose to carry the cross at all fourteen stations. "An important sign", he explained a few days ago, in which prayer and the call for peace will be united. And Leo makes his own the words of St Francis, the saint of peace, whose 800th anniversary of his death is being celebrated this year: "Grant us wretches to do, for love of you, what we know you want".

The war, with its sorrows, is evoked throughout. And one feels above all the wounds experienced by the Holy Land, as of other areas of the world at war. And the images seen and reviewed in recent years run through: from prisoners deprived of dignity to hostages, from the dead under the rubble without dignified burial to mothers mourning children "mown to death in war zones".

The Pope's day began with two important phone calls. Firstly the one with Herzog in which, the Vatican reported, "the need was reiterated to reopen all possible channels of diplomatic dialogue, in order to put an end to the serious conflict underway, with a view to a just and lasting peace throughout the Middle East". The conversation 'dwelt on the importance of protecting the civilian population and promoting respect for international and humanitarian law'. Of a different tone is the account of the Israeli president, who is keen to report that with the Pope he spoke of the "continuing threat of missile attacks by the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies against people of all faiths. I recalled the recent Iranian missile attacks on Jerusalem that fell in the area of sites sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews'.