The following are excerpts of an interview with Pope Francis by Lorena Bianchetti for Rai Uno on Good Friday:

The mercy of God

“We must never give up on a person, no… who has ended up doing evil, and say ‘This person is condemned’. A woman comes to my mind who went to confession to the Curé of Ars because her husband had thrown himself off a bridge. The Curé listened to her, crying. ‘What I am most upset about is that he is in hell’. ‘Stop,’ he told her. ‘Between the bridge and the river is the mercy of God.’ God always tries to save us even to the end, because he embedded something good in us. He placed it in Cain as well, Abel and Cain, but Cain did a violent deed; and war is carried out with this deed.”

We are racists

“Refugees are subdivided. There’s first class, second class, skin colour, [if] they come from a developed country [or] one that is not developed. We are racists. And this is bad. The problem of the refugees is a problem that Jesus suffered too, because he was a migrant and a refugee in Egypt when he was a child, to escape death. How many of them are suffering to escape death.”

The Church and a worldly spirit

“The hardest cross that the Church inflicts on the Lord today is worldliness, a worldly spirit. The worldly spirit that is partly the spirit of power, but not only of power, it is living according to the style of the world that is fed by and grows with money. This is something interesting. In the devil’s three temptations of Jesus, the devil proposes worldly things. The first, fame: this is human – but then? Power, vanity: worldly things. Because the worldliness is attractive, and the Church, when it falls into worldliness, into the worldly spirit, the Church is defeated.”

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)