My heart still resonates with the echoes of what I witnessed at Sant'Andrea della Valle—Bishop Gérard Daucourt's reflection on the parable of the Prodigal Son, followed by the Chicco community's remarkable mime performance.
Emeritus Bishop of Nanterre and longtime friend of the Arca di Troly, Daucourt immediately captured the room's attention with a charming bit of theater: his smartphone buzzed beneath his cassock, and when he pulled it out, it turned out to be a pocket Gospel. "Now that's a device that will always send you the right message to start your day," he said with a grin. "Keep it turned on and close to you."
Beyond the engaging questions the bishop posed—answered with directness and precision by our young people—one moment struck me deeply. It was his attention to a particular passage in this parable, one we've read countless times, yet which yields something new each time we return to it.
Consider the scene itself: the prodigal son stumbles home in rags, gaunt and sorrowful and repentant. Before he can speak a word—before he can voice the apology he has rehearsed over and over in his mind during the journey home—his father runs out to meet him. He throws his arms around his son and kisses him. No questions asked. No need for confession first. The son hasn't even spoken his prepared words: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son."
But the father already holds him close. He demands no explanation, no humiliation, no historical accounting of his wanderings. He simply forgives. His eyes are on the future. His heart overflows with joy, and he wants everyone to witness this happiness—through a feast, a celebration, a feast.
How often we demand the opposite. Before we forgive, before we accept someone, before we welcome them, we feel compelled to dig up their story, to rehearse their pain, sometimes to broadcast it as gossip and rumor. We need to "label" people, to "categorize" them—even those we've decided to forgive and accept.
The father does not. He looks at the heart. When he perceives genuine remorse, when he senses the desire to be welcomed, the need to be loved—he opens his arms. He is ready to begin a new story of love. The account of what has passed will come later, if at all, as a confidence shared between them, deepening their bond. Never as the price of being loved.
True forgiveness is forgiveness the child need never carry as a burden again.
True acceptance looks not to the past, but to the heart. It welcomes with joy the person who comes seeking a relationship of love.
Valeria Mastroiacovo, 2016