In the month of November, when the Church traditionally remembers the faithful departed, the Pope invites people to pray with him for all those who have lost a child. Fathers and mothers who have experienced grief that is “particularly intense” and beyond all human logic, because – as Francis recalls in the video message accompanying his prayer intention – “living longer than one’s child is not natural.”

We are so unprepared to survive the death of a child, Francis observes in this month’s Pope’s Video, that not even our dictionary has an appropriate word to describe this condition of life. “Think about it: when one spouse loses the other, he or she is a widower or widow. A child who loses a parent is an orphan or orphan. There is a word for it. But for a parent who loses a child, there is no word. It is a pain so great that there is no such word for it.”

There is no such thing as a good word, the Pope reminds us, in part because in the face of the loss of a son or daughter, words “are not needed.” Not even those “of comfort,” which “are sometimes trivial and sentimental,” and which, “even if they are said naturally with the best of intentions, can end up amplifying the wound.” So the answer is another: more than simply talking to these parents, “we need to listen to them, to be close to them with love, taking care of their pain with responsibility, imitating the way Jesus Christ consoled those who were afflicted.”

Francis recalls that some families, “after suffering such a terrible tragedy, were reborn in hope”: the key was the support of faith, the presence of that “consoling spirit” that the Pope invokes in his prayer intention for it to bring “peace to the heart.” Some of them are among the protagonists of this month’s Pope’s Video, which brings together stories of great sorrow and hope. Among the stories of hope are those of the Naìn group, founded in Italy within the community of Romena (in the province of Arezzo) , in which once a month families who have lost a child gather. Naìn takes its name from the place not far from Nazareth where Jesus meets a widow whose only child has died, and wordlessly touches the coffin of the dead child: a sign that gestures, in the face of such great grief, and counts much more than words.

Andrea Sarubbi

Coordinator of the Pope’s Video