(ANSA) - VATICAN CITY, 01 JAN - "While mothers give their lives and women guard the world, let's all work to promote mothers and protect women. How much violence there is against women! Enough! Hurting a woman it is to outrage God, who took humanity from a woman, not from an angel, not directly: from a woman ". The Pope said this in the homily of the Mass at St. Peter's. "The new year begins in the sign of the Mother. The maternal gaze is the way to be reborn and grow. Mothers, women look at the world not to exploit it, but to have life: looking with the heart, they manage to keep dreams and concreteness together" , he added.
And "there is a need for people who are able to weave threads of communion, which counteract the too many barbed threads of divisions". "Mothers - Pope Francis continued - know how to overcome obstacles and conflicts, they know how to instill peace. They thus succeed in transforming adversity into opportunities for rebirth and growth opportunities. They do it because they know how to guard, they know how to keep the threads of life together".
And therefore "the Church is mother, the Church is woman", "we cannot find the place of woman in the Church without mirroring her in the woman mother", "this is the place of the woman in the Church".
"Mary - the Pope said again in the homily of the Mass - compares different experiences, finding the hidden threads that bind them. In her heart, in her prayer she carries out this extraordinary operation: she binds the beautiful and the ugly; she does not keep them apart. , but it unites them ".
For this "Mary is the mother of catholicity, we can say" that "for this Mary is 'Catholic', because she unites, she does not separate", concluded the Pope.
(HANDLE).