Tears, Tributes as Italy Mourns Its Quake Dead
Category World | Friday, October 16th, 2009
It was a scene that moved a nation: mourners clinging to one another and sobbing over neat rows of more than 200 coffins, some with the tiny caskets of children resting on top.
Italians joined in an outpouring of grief on Good Friday as victims of Italy’s most devastating earthquake in a generation were remembered at an open-air funeral Mass in the hard-hit city L’Aquila.
In Rome, Pope Benedict XVI urged survivors not to give up, praying at the end of the Good Friday torch-let Way of the Cross procession at the Colosseum that they may see the “star of hope.” And Premier Silvio Berlusconi captured the pathos that swept the country, wondering aloud: “How can one not be moved by so much pain?”
The 6.3-magnitude temblor — which killed at least 290 people and left nearly 40,000 homeless — struck Monday at the start of Holy Week, heightening the suffering in this deeply Roman Catholic country.