From the end of January to February, I visited four of our entities in Latin America, two in Brazil and two in Colombia. I also attended part of the Chapter of a Province in Peru. It was a rich immersion in different cultures, traditions, and ways of living Franciscan life, a journey of light and shadows.
In Brazil, I saw the vitality and exuberance of the people and the friars, who are very close to reality. But, at the same time, I saw how quite a few of our presences are at a decisive point of choice. They are discerning how to carry out their activities and pastoral and social presence styles that require rethinking and relaunching in these times, with an ever-more charismatic basis.
I recognised the desire of several friars to live the beauty of the evangelical life of St Francis and to discern what is opposed to this. Sometimes structures that are too large or activities that leave little time and breath or community styles that do not always create a fraternal and missionary environment with the right atmosphere. We can find new pathways to the future in the tension between these different elements.
In Colombia, I got to know the situation of a country rich in many diversities, cultural, linguistic and ethnic and equally rich in contrasts, including very pronounced social inequalities, and the suffering of so many of the simplest people. I also saw the widespread violence in entire areas of this country outside the control of the State and in the hands of very different forces. Our friars are present in several of these frontlines, some of which remain almost the sole presence of the Church under challenging circumstances.
What a beautiful witness of Franciscan life lived as lesser brothers in harsh and yet hopeful settings of hope and life!
In Peru, the meetings and dialogue with the friars brought me into contact with an ancient missionary history that is very much alive and with the urgency of rediscovering that inspiration today to relaunch it. Therefore, we have taken some steps and are accompanying the rest of the journey of these friars.
The service given to education in these provinces, called to become increasingly a forum for evangelisation, is important.
The dramatic news of the earthquake in Syria and Turkey accompanied me and the closeness from afar to our friars in Syria. Another painful page in today's history that makes us bow our heads and seek the Lord's faithful presence with humble prayer in all things.
I am now preparing to meet the Minister Provincials of Europe together with the General Definitory. The question I want to bring to them is how to live on this continent, currently in a very delicate period: on the one hand, a rarely known unity, thanks to the war in Ukraine, and on the other, divided by different visions and choices.
As Friars Minor, we want to learn to welcome the many causes of the crisis that we find on the continent as opportunities, not least the religious indifference that seemingly reduces the experience of faith to the private sphere. How to be evangelisers in such a context? How can we learn to meet many while being able to offer a broader, higher perspective that gathers and relaunches the expectations, albeit contradictory, of the people of this time? How to remind Europe of a Christian memory that is a source for the future in this dark and apparently hopeless present? Then how can we rethink and restructure our presence in Europe in dialogue with each other? How can we be open in a renewed way to internationality and knowing how to choose presence that are significant to our charism?
These questions challenge us all, not only in Europe, and in this Centenary of the Rule, ask us again to embrace that pledge of full life that the Lord promised us through the Gospel professed and lived by Francis of Assisi.
