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Pope Francis has said that if he is assassinated or attacked, he has asked God to spare him physical pain.
In an interview with Buenos Aires favela publication La Carcova News, the Pope said he had asked the Lord to take care of him.
“But if your will is that I die or that they do something to me, I ask you just one favour: that it doesn’t hurt because I am a big wimp when it comes to physical pain,” the Pope said.
If fanatics want to kill him, it is “God’s will”, he said. “Life is in God’s hands.”
Groups that could pose threats to the Pope reportedly include Islamist militants and the Italian mafia.
The interview with La Carcova News came about after the shantytown’s parish priest collated inquiries from hundreds of children and young adults and boiled them down to about a dozen questions.
When the priest visited the Pope at his Vatican residence last month, he handed the written questions to Francis, who gave answers on the spot.
One of the questions saw the Pope asked about young people’s attraction to “virtual relationships” and how to help them escape “their world of fantasy” and to experience “real relationships”.
The Pope said “sometimes virtual relationships are not imaginary, but are concrete” and real.
However, he said, the best thing is for people to have real, physical interaction and contact with each other.
He said the big risk he sees is with people’s ability to gather such a huge amount of information that nothing is done with it and it has no impact on changing lives.
He said this process turns young people into a sort of “youth museum”.
Having a rich fruitful life is not found in “the accumulation of information or just through virtual communication, but in changing the reality of existence. In the end, it means loving”.
Sources
- The Tablet
- Catholic News Service
- Image: CBC
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