Card. Angelo Bagnasco

“He is a heavy-weight spiritual box champion” – this is how a Church historian described Angelo Bagnasco, who was the President of the Italian Episcopal Conference as well as the Chair of the Council of the Bishops' Conferences of Europe. The Archbishop Emeritus of Genoa, who holds a doctorate in Philosophy, compared the pandemic and the current situation to a childhood experience in one of his homilies: “When I was a child, one night I was playing on a pile of rubble – a testament to the war – while waiting for dinner time to come. I cried out from below the street to my mother, who then opened the door and started calling me by my name, because she was afraid that I would get lost in the dark staircase. I followed her voice to the fourth floor, where she grabbed my arm and embraced me. [...] The pandemic is the dark staircase of our lives. And we are guided by God’s reassuring voice and open arms.”