Your Holiness the Pope… It is a source of great joy for me to live with you and your Church the ancient and sacred tradition of the consecration prayer for the new cathedral.

What we are actually celebrating is not only an important rite for the Coptic community living in this region and for the entire Coptic Church. It is much more than that. It is an important event for our Church and for the city of Venice, which today more than ever before is called to rediscover the origins of its history that It shares it with the Church of Alexandria, as they have the same roots that connect us both to Saint Mark the Evangelist.

We live in times troubled by bloody conflicts and injustices that are often forgotten. We still have before our eyes the horrific images of the violence committed in recent days in Israel and Palestine, but also images of what has been happening in Ukraine for a year and a half now.

We carry in our hearts the suffering of the Armenian people and many Christians in the world who suffer persecution and harassment of every kind amidst the absolute and unjustified silence of the media, offering us Christians in the West in particular a testimony to the power of pure and true faith.

We also cannot forget the pain of the many men and women forced to leave their homes and loved ones to escape the grip of hunger, war and climate change.
Finally, we must seriously ask ourselves about the direction that our West – which appears to be at peace – is taking in light of the processes of secularization driven by increasingly noticeable ideas of relativism and individualism in the name of a false idea of ​​freedom, which ends up submitting man to unprecedented forms of spiritual slavery and domination. Existential ideas erode the foundations of the truth of the sanctity and dignity of the human entity and plant the seeds of irreparable hostility in society.

In front of the great challenges that await us, we feel the need for a great push of strong faith towards the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, Lord of time and history. He alone is the source of our hope, we are aware and certain that only through the shared witness of mutual love will it be possible for us Christians to spread the joyful good news of the Gospel that every person awaits and which our Church previously received from Saint Mark.

In the unity of Christians lies the seed of reconciliation of a world wounded by divisions, and it is this unity that we are called upon first and foremost to look to and cooperate to achieve. How beautiful it is to see representatives of all the traditional Christian churches in Venice gathered around Your Holiness today. How beautiful it is to come together to thank the Lord for this new cathedral and for giving us a father in common in the faith, St. Mark the Evangelist.

Today, on behalf of the Catholic community in Venice, I am pleased to present the venerable relics of his first disciple, Saint Anianus. By imitating him, we all wish to follow in the footsteps of Saint Mark once again, to show to the world divided by differences the unity of love that only God can give.

We look to the future with the hope of faith and the desire to grow even more in this mutual friendship whose source is God, not man, confident that through it and for its sake the Lord will show His grace to us all.

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