Pope Francis has often lamented that the newspapers are too full of crime and destruction, when the reality of life is very different. In fact, life is full of the people he calls the “saints next door.”
On February 6, after praying the midday Angelus, Pope Francis shared two news items. Even though both end in tragedy, they reflect the goodness of people, even complete strangers.
#SaveRayan
First, the Pope recounted:
One, in Morocco, how all the people gathered together to save Rayan. It was all the people there, working to save a child! They put everything they had into it. Unfortunately, he did not make it. But that example – I was reading in Il Messaggero today – those photographs of the people there, waiting to save a child…. Thank you to these people for this testimony!
The Pope is talking about the story of Rayan Oram, age 5, who fell some 100 feet into a well shaft that his father was repairing on Tuesday afternoon in Tamorot, Morocco. For several days, #SaveRyan was trending around the world.
The boy was extracted on Saturday afternoon, but unfortunately died shortly afterward. Morocco’s royal palace responded, saying, “His Majesty King Mohammed VI called the parents of the boy who died after falling down the well.”
Pope Francis visited Morocco in 2019.
To die embracing my father
The other story that the Pope shared involved a migrant to Italy from Ghana:
And another one, which happened here in Italy, and will not appear in the newspaper. In Monferrato: John, a Ghanaian boy, 25 years old, a migrant, who suffered everything that many migrants suffer to get here, and in the end he settled in Monferrato. He started to work, to make his future, in a wine company. And then he fell ill with a terrible cancer; he is dying.
And when they told him the truth, [asking] what he would have liked to do, [he replied:] “To go back home to embrace my father before dying.” As he was dying, he thought of his father.
And in that village in Monferrato, they immediately took up the collection and, medicated with morphine, they put him and a companion on a plane and sent him home so that he could die in his father’s arms.
Reflecting on these two testimonies, Pope Francis expressed his gratitude and encouraged hope:
This shows us that today, in the midst of so much bad news, there are good things, there are “saints next door.” Thank you for these two testimonies which are good for us.
And today we celebrate...