In the Amazon and Peru, some cultural evenings offered me a particularly intense experience: traditional dances in which colours, rhythms and movements become a surprising synthesis between indigenous cultures and European heritage, merged today in a very vivid mosaic. Participating in these moments is deeply striking you immediately understand that it is not just folklore but living culture.
Thinking back to those moments, I realised that a discreet thread ran through the entire journey of this month, between Brazil, Peru and Argentina. It wasn't obvious at first. It emerged little by little, in the faces, in the places, in the stories encountered along the way.
In Brazil, I travelled through very different worlds — from the mining lands of Minas Gerais to the Amazon, from the Northeast to Mato Grosso, up to the South — meeting friars, Poor Clare sisters, and many Secular Franciscans. Then Peru and Argentina, in Córdoba: other faces, other voices. A continent that escapes any synthesis.
Yet, right within this variety, something returns.
It is perceived by entering an ancient convent, observing a façade, and stopping in front of an image of popular piety. An interweaving of stories: indigenous traces, Franciscan memory, Iberian heritage. Nothing has remained the same at the beginning. And perhaps this is precisely the point: the charism, encountering these lands, has taken on a new face, without losing its source.
It can also be sensed in the encounters: in the simplicity of fraternities, in closeness to the poor, in a faith with many languages. As if, over the centuries, the friars had learned to speak with different accents, becoming — between openness and fatigue — part of these peoples.
There is no shortage of efforts. In some regions, especially among native peoples, the distance remains. The sense of time, of the relationship with creation, of us before the individual, is different. Approaching religious life - with its Western imprint - requires time, patience, and delicacy. The native friars are few. By welcoming them, we can allow a different fraternal and missionary life to grow, more integrated into cultures. Paths that cannot be forced.
And yet, here too a deeper intuition emerges: the Gospel never arrives in an empty land. The Spirit precedes, sows, and prepares. And often we are the ones who must learn to recognise, even before explaining.
Perhaps this is what I perceived most strongly: evangelising is not first of all bringing something but letting oneself be reached. Stop, listen, receive. Discovering that the encounter changes even those who thought they had come to give.
Our time is not very different from that of Francis, as the Decree of the Centenary year we are living reminds us. He , too , has crossed borders, met other worlds, learning — not without effort — to receive before offering.
This continent remembers him, with a quiet and intense force at the same time.
The mission is not to export a model.
It is letting ourselves be changed by the encounter, in the trust that the Spirit precedes us, already at work in every culture, in every face.
