The Outline of reflection given to the Italian Church in preparation for the Verona Congress opens with these binding words, “At the beginning of this millennium, loaded with challenges and possibilities, the Risen Lord calls the Christians to be credible witnesses, through a life re-generated by the Spirit and capable of being sign of a renewed humanity and world”. One area for the exercise of this testimony is that of the forms and conditions of existence in which the human frailty emerges and expresses itself.  «Christian hope manifests its truth especially in cases of frailty: it does not need to conceal it, rather it welcomes it with discretion and tenderness, returning it to the journey of life considerably enriched”¹. We can obtain this not by marginalising frailty from our life, but by acknowledging it as a characteristic of “our humanity”. We can obtain it by humanising the relation with all those who, in particularly painful situations, live its most serious effects.

Frailty constantly crosses different areas of testimony, which we, as Christians, have the task to express. It marks the affective and familiar life and is present in places of work and of feast. It enters the world of communication, of social formation and life.  In the various experiences of frailty, God re-echoes even today his invitations, calling the individual believer and the whole community to testimony, so that the Gospel of Jesus Christ “may express its lasting truth in the changing circumstances of life”². The Christians do not live separated from the world, neither confused in it. As pilgrims within history, but on a journey towards a transcendent goal, they are invited to be witnesses of hope in the world” (cfr 1Pt 2, 11).

1. The frailties of life 

Frailty expresses itself in many forms. They are sicknesses, suffering, disability, uneasiness, weakness, vulnerability, poverty and many more. Every form of frailty is symbol of others, provocation to reflect, to be involved getting rid of our illusions and to witness, to look in the face of experiences, which we would like to be far from us.  To look in the face of experiences different from ours, which we would not like to meet and to see, but which are often within our psyche, within the house we live in or of those who live around us. We feel suddenly frail when somebody whom we love is touched by it or because of particularly violent and painful chronicle events. We wonder why we were not aware of desperate situations of suffering, of love relations, which were changing direction. Often, they are stories dramatic because of the solitude accompanying the mystery of extreme violence. This is not a fruit of hatred, but is rooted in a deep affection unable to find practicable ways of hoping in a more dignified future. It is symbol of personal and family frailty worsened by a too frail social support³.  

In moments of particular frailty, persons need a “net” of protection and solidarity, which cannot always solve their suffering, but can somehow render it more human and bearable. They need companions of journey ready to cover a stretch of road with him⁴. Near our powerless and frail presence, persons who suffer can re-discover the tenderness of God. To save us, this God has accepted to become powerless and frail, from the cradle in the inn, to the cross outside the city.  

To share the uneasiness and suffering of others often means cutting off the vicious circle between isolation and solitude. It means working together (collaborate) so that we may start a virtuous circle in which love creates affectively strong relations of recognition, of solidarity and support. A circle in which we commit ourselves to an adequate care, integrating an appropriate therapy and a new sensitivity, as Benedict XVI reminds us in his message for the “world day of the sick” concerning mental uneasiness. We must never separate the sick person from its family, which we must support because only if it is strong the family can help its dear one. Without our support the family may risk to exhaust its physical, emotive and relational energies. The single Samaritans must learn “to be together in taking care” of persons who ask the oil of consolation and seek the wine of hope. These are signs of grace, which open the night of suffering to the Easter light of the crucified and risen Lord⁵.

In the experiences of particular frailty, our illusions, pretensions, masks and defences fall down. We receive the call to look directly at the limit of our human identity. By questioning ourselves on the meaning of our human frailty, mainly when it is the case of our own frailty, we finish by questioning ourselves on the sense of our existence. We are urged to know clearly the greatness and the limits of our freedom, of our inter-dependence, even before we are born, the reciprocal frailty, which defines any love-relation, as well as care relation. To eliminate frailty is, perhaps, a utopia that qualifies our times. Yet, frailty continues to exist and we must constantly measure ourselves with it.

2. Saved by a frail God  

Frailty characterises our humanity as well as that of a God who, in the Incarnation and death on a cross of his Son, assumes and saves it. The Biblical message is a message of salvation. Our God is a Saviour God. However, there is something paradoxal, against current, and therefore humanly foolish and scandalous in the God who reveals himself in Jesus. “The God whom Jesus reveals to us saves men with the strength of his weakness. Our God manifests his omnipotence by saving us in the impotence of Jesus. By becoming weak and frail he makes us strong, by becoming sin he makes us holy, by making himself mortal, he gives us life”⁶ (see 1Co 1,18-25). From the moment of Incarnation, throughout his existence, mainly in the extreme frailty of his death on the cross, God is in solidarity with our frailty. He saves it assuming it as its own and turning it into a place of reconciliation with humanity and self-revelation of his loving presence.

 In many experiences of frailty that sign our life and that of those whom we love, suffering often has the upper part and the control over us. There are proposals of different religious solutions to answer the why of our suffering, We find a sense in which God is involved, underlining time by time the transcendence or immanence, the omnipotence or the weakness, the strength or frailty, the hiding or the revelation, the silence or the word, the distance or the nearness of love.

We must start always “from Jesus Christ” in giving sense to our frailties, in acknowledging them as fully human and in humanising our relations with those who live them with particular intensity. We must “start from Jesus Christ”, keeping our sight fixed on the face of the Lord and on his action⁷. We cannot explain fully the ultimate sense of frailty and suffering in the living and dying of a Christian, but we can live it within the experience of testimony of faith, hope and love. “Jesus has not come to explain suffering to us, but to fill it with his presence, to share and transfigure it, showing us the spirit with which we must assume it to be similar to him”⁸.

Everyone asks himself the sense of the frailties that make us to suffer. In seeking an answer often we question God. However, the God to whom we address our question, answers us from the extreme frailty of the cross. “On the cross, Christ not only fulfilled our redemption through suffering, but he redeemed also suffering itself “On the cross God accompanies our human suffering, thus winning from within its sense of absurdity”⁹.

The definitive meaning of the suffering of Jesus appears in a fulfilled manner only in the event of resurrection, the last answer of the Father to the cry of His Son. This answer gives sense and fulfilment to his last attitude of filial trust and obedience. The resurrection Sunday, however, does not nullify the passion Friday. The power of the Risen Lord does not nullify the frailty of the cross.  

The tension between the cross and the resurrection keeps on characterising the life of Christians. They receive the call to live between two different, but simultaneously present attitudes. First: the search for the thenot yet eliminated sense of suffering, because of the frailty of our life. However, we welcome and live it as a sharing of the passion of Christ. The second attitude is the awareness that the expired power of the Resurrection of the Son of God is already efficacious in the time of the Church. It is efficacious in the “mediations” of his love to be a narrating testimony and the best “theology”. The most adult figure of our witnessing to God is “faith that works through charity” (Gal 5, 5), faith that takes “body” and becomes history in sharing and love¹⁰.

3. To respect His name 

A sick child is a particular sign of frailty. “When a child enters the hospital, - Andrea Canevaro writes - it is as if we took it to a wood, far from home. There are children who fill their pockets with white pebbles and throw them on to the ground, so that they may be able of finding again the way home also at night, in the moon-light. However, there are children who are unable to find pebbles and use dry breadcrumbs to trace their way back. It is a very frail track and the ants are there to cancel it. The children get lost in the wood and do not know how to go back home”¹¹. In our relation with children, we must be respectful, paying attention not to trample on their frail journey, but also to the particular frailty of their parents¹².

Near the sick child and its parents, the religious interpretations and the images we present with our words, above all with our presence and attitude, play an important and vital role to face the situation. They are a key factor for their health also at spiritual level.  When we are near a person who suffers, we should not be worried about a theodicea that delivers “talks” on God and tries defences. We should rather use a pastoral theodicea, causing people to feel that God is close through our nearness, our tender care and love. God is present also in our embarrassed silence. He is a God who speaks of himself (theo-logos) through our relations that witness to his love.  

If it is true that love and only love is credible, through our frail love relations, we, too, can make God credible ( thus saving him from the eyes of those who suffer) “in the certainty that God is Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible for us”¹³

Only a society respectful of human life, mainly in its most frail expressions, is a human society. Only the Church that welcomes the newly born baby and protects it, that cures the sick and takes care of the one who is more seriously sick, that supports the poor and gives hospitality to the abandoned, the marginalised and to the immigrants can call herself “teacher of humanity”. Indeed a Church visits the prisoner and protects the aged. Welcoming frailty is not concerned only with extreme situations. “We need to promote the growth of a life-style towards our own being creatures and in the relation with every creature. Our existence is frail and every human relation puts us in contact with other frailties, just as every human or natural area is the fruit of a frail balance”¹⁴ .

In our experience of frailty, of sickness’, suffering and fault, we strongly feel the duty to put off our sandals and to pay a constant attention never to mention the Name of God in vain.

4. The reciprocity of love 

Frailty can find its meaning (be “saved”) in fraternal solidarity, in affection, in love that reconciles us with our human condition. Each of us is the fruit of the care donated to our non-autonomy, to our frailty, which is not only initial and biological, but lasts during our whole biographic course of life. Frailty defines us as a cause of need, but also as the motive of a  gift. Human frailty seeks a recognitional relation (the reciprocal recognition of the child from its mother and of the mother from her child). The reciprocal gift (though in different forms) passes through this way.

Only by acknowledging and accepting in our life and relations the opening to God, as well as the creature and filial relation that binds us to Him, are capable of ransoming our frailty, inserting it in a transcending dynamic of love, in a future that saves it.  All this is evident in the limit-situations of suffering, where we can do very little materially, but which have sense anyhow, being they the occasion of reciprocal recognition as persons in relation with God in a reciprocal offering of his Love. We exist before our exchanges of love, but we need these in order to grow.  

As Church, after the example of Mary, we receive the call to be the womb that welcomes frail persons, saving them from marginalisation and non-sense, acknowledging in them the image of God and the presence of Christ, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me” (Mt 25, 35-36). We could add,  “I was frail and you treated me with care”. In the Novo Millennio Ineunte, John Paul II underlines, “This page is not just a simple invitation to charity. It is a page of Christology projecting a beam of light on the mystery of Christ. The Church measures her faithfulness as Spouse of Christ” on this page as well as on the side of orthodoxy (no. 49). Therefore, it is also a page of ecclesiology.

It is not always possible to heal the suffering. At times, we are powerless and remain silent. Silence is often of a great service. Just a love that shares the sorrow, like Mary at the eet of the cross, can be a ”theological space”, in which God reveals himself and in which we can purify our own theology. Because of man’s frailty, suffering can become also the space in which the Holy Spirit “comes to help our weakness” (Ro 8, 26). He comes to help the weakness of the one who suffers as well as of him who cares and inspires forms of exchanging reciprocal love “in which every person gives and receives into the deepest and most silent dimension of its being¹⁵.

A humble attending the school of the sick and of the sufferer can open wisdom journeys to build up a different vision of life, health, frailty and care. The frailest persons can teach us what saving love that is. They can become heralds of a new world no longer dominated by strength, violence and aggressivity, but by love, solidarity and welcome. They can be heralds of a new world transfigured by the light of Christ, the Son of God made flesh, crucified and risen for our sake”¹⁶. However, we need always a contemplative gaze of faith to discover in them the living image of the Creator, the face of His suffering crucified and risen Son and the mysterious, but always present multiform action of the Spirit¹⁷.

We need also to pay a particular attention to a relation “of communion”, in which the wounds and the pains of others may touch us. The frailty of the other enters in syntony with our own frailty and we become vulnerable. He who stays near particularly frail persons and takes care of them with passion (compassion), needs an attentive professional, relational and spiritual formation¹⁸.

5. The precious value of hope  

Hope is a frail and precious good. It finds its nourishment and the womb to grow only in love. In our relation with the sufferer, hope commits itself in love and receives nourishment from it. In this service, the Christian gives reason of the hope that is in him (I Peter, 3, 15). We can find the last hope in finite hopes every time that they contain the relational signs of God and His love. The concept of journey speaks to us of a hope (therefore of a future) based on the trust of the covenant, even when the end is out of sight, but there are friendly and meaningful presences accompanying and re-assuring us.

In the trustful relation with its mother, in the certainty of her love, the child opens to hope. In this sense, the Church offers herelf as a community of hope, every time that we live in her, in the meaningful relations of the present, some anticipations of the kingdom of God’s love This anticiparion that shapes the present as well as the future, is celebrated particularly in the sacraments. They are the memory of the future, sure pledge of its realisation, “a place where the different forms of human frailty are defeated in their deepest roots“¹⁹.

The Lord has left in the Eucharist the particular pledge of the hope that does not delude.  In fact, in the Eucharist we find in action the hope that nurtures our waiting. It is the true answer to our search for the sense of life and of our future. An eschatological tension gives an impulse to our historical journey, by sowing a seed of lively hope that “stimulates our sense of responsibility” towads the present²⁰. In the Easter logic of the Eucharist, memorial of the death and resurrection of Christ, the Christian welcomes the call to build up the not yet of the future world in the already of his present time. He welcomes the call to live the cross of his frail life in the hope of resurrection, of which the Eucharist is experience and guarantee. Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, the divine Wayfarer walks with us, explains the Scriptures to us, supports our frail hope and warms our heart, opening it to the courage of announcement and testimony (cfr. Lc 24,13-35) ²¹.

In the frail sign of broken and shared bread, God “reveals” (enveils and constantly hides) even today the omnipotence of his love and makes us mysteriously participate in it.

In the frailty of our caring, the Holy Spirit of love is mysteriously present because of our hope.

1.  Italian Episcopal Conference, Testimoni di Gesù Risorto, speranza del mondo, Outline of reflection in preparation for the Verona Ecclesial Congress  16-20 october 2006, Paoline, Milan, nn. 1 e 15/c. [Torna al testo]

2.  Giovanni Paolo II, Pastores dabo vobis. Post-synodal apostolic exhortation, 25 March, 1992, no. 10. [Torna al testo]

3.  Sandrin L., Fragile vita. Lo sguardo della teologia pastorale, Camilliane, Torino 2005, pp. 130-132. Cfr. This text is also for an introduction to pastoral theology and other themes linked to frailty. [Torna al testo]

4.  Cfr. Sandrin L., Compagni di viaggio. Il malato e chi lo cura, Paoline, Milano 2000. [Torna al testo]

5.  Prefazio comune VIII, Gesù buon samaritano.  [Torna al testo]

6.  Venturi G., La fragilità salvata, in AA.VV., Una fragilità salvata. Testimoni di Gesù risorto, speranza del mondo, in “Comunicare la fede”, 2 (2006), p. 9. [Torna al testo]

7.  Giovanni Paolo II, Novo Millennio Ineunte. Apostolic letter at the end of the 2000 Great Jubilee, 6 january, 2001. [Torna al testo]

8. Latourelle R., L’uomo e i suoi problemi alla luce di Cristo, Cittadella, Assisi 1992 (or. r. 1981), p. 400. [Torna al testo]

9.  Giovanni Paolo II, Salvifici Doloris,  Apostolic letter on the Christian sense of human suffering, 11 February, 1984, no.19 [Torna al testo]

10. CEI, Testimoni di Gesù risorto… n. 8. [Torna al testo]

11. Canevaro A., I bambini che si perdono nel bosco, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1976. [Torna al testo]

12. Cfr. la storia di Ernie in Perkins-Buzo J.R., Theodicy in the face of children’s suffering and death, in “The Journal of Pastoral Care”, 2 (1994), pp. 155-161. [Torna al testo]

13. Benedetto XVI, Deus caritas est. Encyclical Letter on Christian love, 25 December, 2005, no.38 . [Torna al testo]

14. CEI, Testimoni di Gesù risorto… n. 15/c.  [Torna al testo]

15. Vanier., Ogni uomo è una storia sacra, EDB, Bologna 1999 (or.fr.1994), p. 32 [Torna al testo]

16. Giovanni Paolo II, Message to the partipants in the International Symposium on “Dignity and rights of mentally handicapped persons”,  Città del Vaticano 5 January, 2004. Cfr. anche CEI – Ufficio nazionale per la Pastorale della salute. Alla scuola del malato, 14°. World day of the sick, 11 February, 2006, Camilliane, Torino 2005.  [Torna al testo]

17. Cfr. Giovani Paolo II, Evangelium vitae. Encyclical Letter, 25 March, 1995, no. 83.  [Torna al testo]

18. Cfr. Sandrin L., Aiutare senza bruciarsi. Come superare il burnout nelle professioni di aiuto, Paoline, Milano 2004. [Torna al testo]

19. Venturi G., La fragilità salvata, in AA. VV. Una fragilità salvata. Testimoni di Gesù risorto, speranza del mondo, in “Comunicare la fede”, 2 (febbraio 2006), p. 10.  [Torna al testo]

20. Giovanni Paolo II, Ecclesia de Eucaristia. Encyclical Letter, 17 April, 2003, nos.. 18 e 20. [Torna al testo]

21. Cfr. Giovanni Paolo II, Mane nobiscum Domine. Apostolic Letter for the Year of the Eucharist (October 2004-October 2005) 7 October, 2004 [Torna al testo].