Throughout his life and papacy, Pope Francis has emphasized his connection to Carmelite mysticism. He would often entrust a problem to a Carmelite saint, asking her “not to solve it, but to take it in hand and help me accept it.” In response, he would receive a flower. This even happened during his hospitalization at Gemelli. And now, a white rose lies on the marble slab in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
By: Salvatore Cernuzio – Vatican News
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On a marble table, beneath paintings and icons, outside his private apartment at Santa Marta, there was always a fresh white rose. It was a symbol of his connection to “Teresina,” St. Therese of Lisieux, the saint to whom he always turned to for blessings and entrusted personal and others’ difficulties to her intercession. And a white rose has been lying since last night on another marble, that of the Ligurian tombstone with the engraving Francis in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore where the mortal remains of Pope Francis rest. Not an artistic choice, but one of continuity and devotion.
This flower has accompanied Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s entire life. He had spoken about it in the book interview El Jesuita, written by Argentine journalists Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, who, describing the library of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, noted a vase full of white roses on a shelf, in front of a photo of the Carmelite mystic who died at just 24 years old in 1897, canonized by Pius XI and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by John Paul II in 1997. “When I have a problem,” the future Pope explained to the two journalists, “I ask the saint not to solve it, but to take it in hand and help me accept it, and as a signal, I almost always receive a white rose.”
It had also happened at the beginning of his pontificate, in September 2013, when he convened a prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Square for peace in Syria, which at the time was on the brink of a bloody conflict. During the vigil, some passages of St. Therese of Lisieux’s poetry were read, and Pope Francis, upon returning to Santa Marta, unexpectedly received a white rose picked by a gardener in the Vatican Gardens.
The Pope received the same gift a few days after his last hospitalization at the Gemelli Polyclinic for bilateral pneumonia: a white rose from the mystical saint, packaged from the house in Lisieux. He kept it on a bedside table next to his bed. Another “sign,” that Therese accompanied him until his last moments of life.
