Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State of His Holiness, was Pope Leo’s legate to the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei as it marked the 150th anniversary of its beginnings: the arrival of the Marian image venerated there.
Paying tribute to the shrine as a place “of hope, prayer, and mercy,” Cardinal Parolin contrasted the Blessed Virgin Mary’s haste at the Visitation—an “interior haste, born of the heart and a profound urge to recount the great works of God”—with the “superficial haste of those who allow themselves to be overwhelmed by activism.”
The shrine, Cardinal Parolin added, was born of St. Bartolo Longo’s own interior haste. After experiencing “a profound interior crisis,” the saint found in the Virgin Mary “the sure path to God, the peace that the world could not offer him,” and felt the urgency of proclaiming that “the Lord is near, loves every man, and nothing is lost.”