"Today, thinking of the dead, let us ask the Lord for peace so that people may no longer kill each other in wars. So many innocent people have died, so many soldiers who leave their lives there and this is because wars are always a defeat. Always..." Words that Pope Francis has pronounced several times in recent days, like a mantra, and that he reiterated yesterday while celebrating the Mass for the commemoration of the dead in the "Rome War Cemetery" of the capital. In front of about three hundred people (including the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri) gathered in the rain, among the 426 tombstones of fallen Commonwealth soldiers, the pontiff launched a cry of pain. "How many dead... Life is destroyed without consciousness of this. There is no total victory. Yes, one wins the other, but behind it is the defeat of the price paid." "I looked at the age of these fallen, most of them in their 20s and 30s. Lives cut off... And I thought of the parents, the mothers who receive that letter: 'Madam, I have the honor of telling you that you have a hero son...'. Yes, hero, but they took it away from me. So many tears in these broken lives." That of Pope Francis, the Vatican media underline, is a tradition carried on in these more than ten years of pontificate with celebrations at the Laurentino Cemetery, at the French Military Cemetery, at the Verano, of Prima Porta, in the American Cemetery of Neptune. Places of memory, of history, of pain that, in these times torn apart by conflicts, remind humanity of the main consequence of war: death. Of all, of the winners and the losers. "Without conscience", to use the words of the pontiff himself.
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