BRUSSELS – Prior to beginning his official itinerary Saturday, Pope Francis made an unannounced visit to a parish in Brussels where he met with members of the local homeless population and stressed the importance of showing love and charity toward others.
“Mercy shows the way to hope,” the pope said, speaking to members of Saint Gilles parish in Brussels and the homeless they assist.
“Looking at each other with love helps everyone – everyone! – to look to the future with confidence and to get back on the road every day,” he said, comparing charity to a fire “that warms the heart, and there is no woman or man on earth who does not need its warmth.”
While life is filled with various problems that need facing, including rejection and misunderstanding, he said “the joy and strength that come from shared love are greater than any difficulty.”
“Every time we let ourselves be involved in the dynamics of solidarity and mutual care, we realize that we receive much more than what we give,” he said.
Francis noted that he was giving the parish a statue of Saint Lawrence, a martyr famous for having presented his accusers, who demanded that he hand over the church’s treasures, the poor and needy members of the Christian community to which he belonged.
“It wasn’t a figure of speech, you know? And not even a simple provocation. It was and is the pure truth: the church has its greatest wealth in its weakest members,” he said,
If Christians truly want to know and show the church’s beauty, he said, “it will do us good to give ourselves to each other like this, in our smallness, in our poverty, without pretensions and with so much love. The Lord Jesus taught us this first, who made himself poor to enrich us with his poverty.”
Pope Francis then made his way to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in the Brussels neighborhood of Koekelberg, where he met with bishops, clergy, and religious.
After that encounter, he paid a visit to the royal crypt of the basilica, where many members of the Belgian royal family are buried. He was welcomed by King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium.
According to a Vatican statement, the pope paused before the tomb of King Baudouin, the last Belgian king to also be the sovereign of the Congo, and prayed in silence.
He later praised Baudouin for having the courage to “leave his place as king so as not to sign a murderous law,” a reference to the fact that Baudouin stepped down for a day in 1990 rather than sign a measure legalizing abortion in Belgium.
Francis urged Belgians to look to Baudouin “at this time in which criminal laws are making their way, hoping that his cause for beatification will proceed,” without specifying which “criminal laws” he had in mind.
