SAN DIEGO — The following are excerpts from Pope Leo XIV’s message for the Sixth World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly, observed on July 26, on the theme “I will never forget you.”
Dear brothers and sisters,
Through the prophet Isaiah, the Lord promises that he will never forget any of us. He assures us that he has engraved our faces on the palms of His hands and that his love is greater than a mother’s love for her child (Isaiah 49:15).
The painful feeling of being forgotten is, unfortunately, shared by many people, and among them are quite a few elderly people. God’s love, which forgets no one, offers itself as an act of justice and a response to the anonymity in which human life all too often ends up lost.
The lives of many elderly people seem to be covered by a veil that shrouds them in oblivion. This is what happens in homes where loneliness reigns and also in those care facilities where each person’s uniqueness risks being reduced to a bed number or an illness.
The celebration of the World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly is an opportunity to rediscover that the Church is called
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