Here’s the preface for a book that Pope Francis wrote.
Before the final hospitalization of Pope Francis, he was able to write his reflections about old age for a preface in a book.
A book written by Cardinal Angelo Scola, retired archbishop of Milan, is set to be published this April 24 by the Vatican publishing house. Early in February, Pope Francis wrote a preface before his final hospitalization, and ahead of the publishing date, the pope died, which was on April 21.
The book is titled “Awaiting a New Beginning. Reflections on Old Age.”
He wrote about Cardinal Scola’s reflections on how he was “preparing for his final encounter with Jesus” with the “consoling certainty” that death was “not the end of everything, but the beginning of something new.”
It is new in the sense that we are going to experience something we have never fully experienced before, which is eternity. He added, “Yes, we must not be afraid of old age, we must not fear embracing becoming old, because life is life, and sugarcoating reality means betraying the truth of things.”
To be old does not mean to be discarded, but to say one is old means experience, wisdom, knowledge, discernment, thoughtfulness, listening, and slowness. It is a matter of how one becomes old. It is in living with grace and not with resentment.
If one experiences “diminished strength, the increasing fatigue of the body, and the reflexes no longer what they were in our youth, with a sense of gratitude and thankfulness,” being old becomes the “age of life.”
As Romano Guardini taught us, it is “truly fruitful and capable of radiating goodness.”
The pope concluded the preface, saying that he wished “to repeat the gesture I made upon first donning the white robe of the papacy in the Sistine Chapel” and embrace Cardinal Scola “at least in spirit.”
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