After the service, Francis took to his open-topped popemobile to greet crowds in the square and the avenue connecting St Peter’s to the River Tiber. The Vatican said about 60,000 people had turned up.
The address, delivered without incident or further indications of poor health, has helped to bolster the observations of those who have downplayed the significance of previous incidents.
“The pope’s decision to abandon the Palm Sunday homily seems to be a spiritual choice, not more,” Deborah Castellano Lubov, a Vatican analyst and contributor for NBC News, said. “It is clear to anyone watching Pope Francis in these years, he doesn’t make decisions based on what others think or what others tell him to do.”
“Concerns that it could be something more worrying didn’t seem to have great foundations, as Pope Francis certainly seemed to be able to recite his appeals at the end of the Mass and circle around afterward greeting the enthusiastic crowds in St. Peter’s Square, before kicking off a grueling Holy Week at full speed,” Lubov said on Sunday, ahead of the pope’s Easter speech. On Saturday night, he presided over the Easter vigil, also without incident.
On Holy Thursday, the pope stuck to the schedule and washed the feet of 12 female inmates at Rebibbia prison in the outskirts of Rome, a tradition meant to emulate Jesus Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet the night before he died.
Due to his mobility problems, he was forced to sit in a wheelchair, but he was determined to carry out the tradition nevertheless. He also became the first pontiff in history to wash the feet of only women on Holy Thursday.
But then, on Good Friday, the Vatican announced at the very last minute that the pope would not attend the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum “to preserve his health” for Saturday’s Vigil and Easter Sunday Mass. The pontiff, the…
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