Pope Francis visits the city of Venice this Sunday. The intense program is concentrated in a single morning, and includes five speeches.
At 7:00 am (Lisbon time) Francisco lands by helicopter on the island of Giudecca, in Venice, and meets the inmates of the prison complex there.
Shortly afterwards, visit the Venice Biennale and the Holy See pavilion, curated by Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça. Also on this island, a greeting from the Pope to the authorities and artists is planned. It is the first time that a Pope has visited this international exhibition.
At the end of this meeting, the Pope heads in a fast patrol boat to the Basilica of Santa Maria da Saúde for another meeting with young people and then crosses a floating bridge that takes him to St. Mark’s Square.
In this emblematic place, the Pope presides over the Eucharist and, only at the end of the celebration, enters the famous basilica to venerate the relics of Saint Mark.
The return to the Vatican is scheduled for noon (Lisbon time).
The Holy See pavilion at this year’s Biennale is titled “With my eyes”. For Cardinal Tolentino, this theme helps to understand the choice of such an unexpected place as a prison, as a way of “drawing our attention to the importance of the way in which we responsibly, conceive, express and build our social, cultural and spiritual.”
Faced with the predominance of digital and the triumph of technologies that propose a deferred and indirect look, the Holy See’s initiative, “seeing with my eyes”, highlights the need to get involved in reality, “not as spectators, but as witnesses” .
The objective is also “to combine religious experience with artistic experience: neither gives up on valuing the total and non-conformist involvement of the subject”, said D. José Tolentino recently, in a meeting with journalists at the Vatican.
