Allow me, Neapolitan and Argentine friends, to confess that you have deeply moved me. I looked at you in the many services broadcast on the various television networks and in the videos that chased each other on social networks, trying to understand. A worldwide phenomenon like this cannot fail to carry within itself a teaching, a warning. I was already sure of it before, but your sincere, sincere, clear pain for the death of Maradona confirmed to me that man is not enough in himself; who needs to play, to love, to dream in order to live. Many of you have gathered near the stadium in Fuorigrotta, in the narrow alleys of our old Naples, in Buenos Aires, in many cities around the world. You felt a strong need to be together and you did it, even if you were running some risk in this time of pandemic. You rested the weight that was falling on your neighbor's shoulders.

You remembered him, you spoke to him, you projected him into the sky, your champion. Some even called him a god. I am not interested in emphasizing your or his exaggerations, or making judgments about his private life. Men are men, with vices and virtues that it is not for me to judge, and I don't do it, I don't want to do it, I don't care. At least in these hours. What interests me, however, and what I gladly do is take note that you too, like me, like every human being in the depths of your heart, rebel against death. You suffer it like a fracture that interposes and crushes forever the beautiful flow of life and affections. And you said: no, death does not exist, death is a lie.

You, Diego, live. You have to live forever. And in these days you have announced it to the world. "O death where is your victory? O death where is your sting? " Saint Paul asked himself. Death must be looked in the eye, it must be challenged; he does not have, cannot have, must not have the last word. Someone says that this way of doing and thinking is only the projection into the skies of man's need to be immortal. Maybe, and it doesn't scare me at all. This would be a need that we did not choose, we did not give ourselves, but that we found ourselves inside, and that claims to be satisfied, like the need to eat, drink, love. Thank you, Neapolitan and Argentinian brothers for shouting to the world that love is stronger than death, and that the heart of man is so vast that it embraces the earth, and not just once.

Rest in peace, champion.