“A sign of the fidelity and affection of our Church and our city to Mary” to “ask that she guide and support us with her love as a Mother in these troubled times – still marked by the consequences” of the Covid-19 pandemic and “so that he may obtain from God the gift of reconciliation and peace for the world and especially for that part of Europe which is Ukraine”. Thus the patriarch of Venice, Msgr. Francesco Moraglia, in the homily delivered this morning in the basilica of the Madonna della Salute defined the “Mass of entrustment and consecration to the Virgin Mary”. The celebration – informs a note from the diocese – was preceded by the prayer of the Rosary led by a group of families of the Patriarchate Family Ministry, in preparation for the World Day of Families which will soon be celebrated in Rome with the Holy Father and also locally in the Dioceses . The thought – said the patriarch – is “always turned to the human tragedy of war” which was defined by Pope Benedict XV as a “useless massacre”. “The suffering of the war, however, dramatically owes us too today, in a different but no less excruciating way. When we thought we didn’t have to experience them again, after the terrible lesson of the twentieth century, we discovered instead that they are also part of the chronicle of our days. Man still does not understand, we men do not understand … What we are experiencing today is not just a “chronological” anniversary, a distant historical date; it is rather an “existential” reinterpretation of events which, in different ways, are re-proposed to us today. Then there were the great war and the “Spanish” pandemic, now we have been and still are grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine ”. “In this way we touch firsthand, through the violence and deaths of recent weeks, how the claim of a ‘man’ who wants to affirm himself about everything and everyone can always come back and make his way in a disruptive and devastating way; the man in the place of God, the man who believes himself to be God, the man who will end up being buried by his intoxication of power and pride ”.