Provincial Ministers and Custodes in Greccio and Fonte Colombo

The new Provincial Ministers and Custodes who are currently meeting in Rome went on a pilgrimage to Greccio and Fonte Colombo on Thursday, 23 January 2020. The day began with Mass in Greccio, the shrine of the Nativity scene (creche). According to Thomas of Celano, Francis in Greccio wanted to “remember the child born in Bethlehem and somehow see with the eyes of the body the hardships in which he found himself because of the lack of things necessary to a newborn, as he lay in a crib and how he lay on the hay between the ox and the ass.” Greccio invites us to use all the means available to us to reveal to all the mystery of Jesus’s poverty, both in the signs and in the reality of our lives. The day concluded at Fonte Colombo, the place where St. Francis wrote the Rule. It is the Rule that we professed at the beginning of our Franciscan life and that we still want to observe today, as then.