Due to acute knee pain, Pope Francis will be skipping this Sunday’s foray into the Italian city of Florence, where he was scheduled to close a summit that brought together bishops and mayors of the Mediterranean to discuss migration.
The announcement, made by the Vatican’s press office, came minutes before a previously scheduled press conference in Florence with a handful of those taking part in the February 23-27 symposium titled “Mediterranean, border of peace.”
“I could hear a two-folded pain from him: For his knee, but also for having to miss this encounter,” said Cardinal Gualiero Basetti, president of the Italian bishops’ conference that is organizing the summit.
Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, archbishop of Florence, urged those who have tickets to still take part in the celebration: “This will be a sign of our affection for the Holy Father. It was with him that we wanted to pray and we will pray with him, albeit with a contact of the heart and not with the gaze that sees him physically close to us. But he is no less close to us, with his person and his concern for the Mediterranean, especially in this moment of great crisis.”
Spanish Cardinal Cristobal Lopez, Archbishop of Rabat, Morocco, said that people often find it easy “to speak about our rights, yet it is difficult for us to speak about our duties. We speak about having a right to an education, but we do not fulfil the duty to provide that education.”
The church he leads is incredibly small: There are estimated 50,000 Catholics in Morocco; most of whom are foreigners coming from Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. “We are a church made of foreigners, but we do not want to be a foreign church.” Having said this, he identified five duties that arose so far during the summit and are applicable both in the community he leads and in the rest of the region.