A group of Irish pilgrims, led by Bishop of Limerick Brendan Leahy, were among crowds at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome on Sunday when Pope Francis made his first public appearance in more than five weeks.
Bishop Leahy greeted the Pope’s recovery as “a symbol of hope and a timely one”.
He said it was a “special moment” for the diocesan pilgrimage that travelled to the hospital on Sunday morning. The “entire pilgrimage group of 60 people were there and truly blessed by the moment”, he said.
They are on a pilgrimage marking the 2025 Jubilee, whose theme is “pilgrims of hope”. “And what a symbol of that hope today was,” said Bishop Leahy.
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“The timing for us on our pilgrimage but, moreover, for the faithful across the world, is remarkable. It lifts us all, encourages us all,” Bishop Leahy said.
There is a need for such signs of hope in the world today, including for Irish people, he said. This was a reference to recent comments by Conor McGregor in Washington.
Addressing people at a Mass in Rome’s St Chrysogonus Church earlier, Bishop Leahy said it is an “irony of ironies, [that] we can end up with an Irish man stridently voicing an anti-immigration message in the White House on St Patrick’s Day – the very day of the celebration of our most famous immigrant who brought us the Christian faith”.
More generally, the Bishop said, it is “a time of great concern regarding how moral and civil rights and liberties seem to be eroding in so many places”. “Mutual distrust in relationships between people and between states is increasing,” he said.
And then there is the “the continuing background drumbeat of horrible wars”, he said.
It seems “such a dark time for so much that we hold dear: respect and protection of human life. So much so that there is a great need for hope in our world today. Perhaps Pope Francis’s decision to declare 2025 a ‘Jubilee Year of Hope’ was entirely prescient to help cast a light in that darkness”, he said.
