Christmas today, thinking of the poor and the marginalized, and that of when he was little, the Buenos Aires of the 1940s, the grandmother who made cappelletti by hand, the family who got together. Interviewed by Repubblica and Stampa, the pope remembers his childhood and talks about his Christmas. Think of the poor and the least, and all the forgotten. And to those sick children who will spend Christmas in the hospital, with words of admiration for those who work in the pediatric wards. And the games of his childhood, the father who read him the book “Heart” or recited Dante. «The future? It will flourish if it is built and, where needed, rebuilt together ».
“I would recommend reading more than a book”
«I would not recommend specific texts. Everyone must have their own interests. More than a book I would recommend reading. Because there is the danger of television filling you with messages that then do not remain, while reading is something else, it is a dialogue with the book itself, it is a moment of intimacy that neither TV nor tablet can give ». It is another passage in the words of Francis. The pontiff recalls the readings that “were the treasure of my childhood and youth, because they transmitted strong, indelible emotions to me, together with those my father read to us, starting with the book” Heart “: I remember that my brothers and I often cried with emotion when we listened to him. “Cuore” was part of our training and remains an unforgettable book for me ». Among the first books read as a young man, “Don Segundo Sombra” by Ricardo Güiraldes; and then the novels of Jorge Luis Borges and Fëdor Dostoevskij, and the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. «The latter was a seduction for me. And then, in adolescence, I read Green Years by Archibald Joseph Cronin: I finally took it up again in the Italian version, and it helped me when I was in the seminary to brush up on your language “, continues the Pope.” The grandmother read us a few chapters of ‘I promessi sposi’, and he also helped us to study them by heart. I recently got them back, because every time you open them you find something new in them. My father often recited “The Betrothed” to us by heart and then explained them to us ».