Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State of His Holiness, celebrated Mass in Assisi on Laetare Sunday, a week before the conclusion of the unprecedented exposure of St. Francis’s remains for veneration.
Cardinal Parolin preached that St. Francis offers “effective therapy” to a world marked by an “unbridled desire to possess, by luxury, waste, superfluity, and consumerism.” This therapy, he said, consists in “sobriety, the joy of small things, the sense of being brothers to everyone and everything.”