The Pope goes to the women's prison in Rome for the Holy Thursday mass

EFE Rome

Rome

Updated Thursday, March 28, 2024-16:47

Pope Francis went this Holy Thursday to the female module of the Roman prison of Rebibbia to celebrate the mass 'In Coena Domini' together with the inmates, staff and police officers of the penitentiary center, who welcomed him with applause.

Francis will wash the feet of twelve inmates,

imitating the gesture of Jesus of Nazareth with his disciples at the Last Supper, which is commemorated this Holy Thursday. "It will be a beautiful moment that the inmates wait for nervously because they were the ones who invited the Holy Father. For them, the Pope's visit is a sign of great attention to the reality of prisons and of great encouragement," said the chaplain of the center, Andrea Carosella, to the official media 'Vatican News'.

The Pope arrived at the prison, the largest female of the four in the entire country, around 4:00 p.m. local time (3:00 p.m. GMT) carried in the wheelchair, as he normally uses due to his well-known mobility problems, and at its doors he was They welcomed dozens of women who

kissed his hands and applauded him

.

In this way, Francis continues a tradition that began with his pontificate, in 2013, of not celebrating the Holy Thursday Mass in the Roman cathedral, the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, but in places of suffering in modern society.

In his eleven years of pontificate he has celebrated the 'In Coena Domini' mass generally in prisons, but also in

reception centers for refugees

, in juvenile correctional facilities or in residences, with the sick. His first Holy Week in Rome as Pope, in 2013, he went to the Roman prison for minors of Casal del Marmo, to which he would return a decade later, in 2023, just a week after being discharged for bronchitis that left him three days hospitalized.

In 2014 he chose to spend that afternoon with the young patients of a Roman peripheral hospital, generally disabled or with psychiatric problems and, in 2016, he would do so with twelve immigrants from the reception center of Castelnuovo di Porto, on the outskirts of Rome. In the following years, Francis would go to the Roman penitentiaries of Rebibbia, Regina Coeli or Velletri, as well as Paliano, in the province of Frosinone (center).

This morning, the Argentine Pontiff

opened the rites of the Easter Triduum of Holy Week

in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican with the Chrism Mass, in which the institution of the sacrament of priestly orders is commemorated. In recent weeks, he has often been forced to give up reading his speeches due to the flu, but today he read his homily normally and tomorrow he is expected to go to the Roman Coliseum to preside over the Good Friday Stations of the Cross, which For the first time he will have meditations written by himself.