In recent visits I was able to meet several friars who live in situations of war and of various forms of socio-political tension. I think of the brothers of Ukraine, of Syria and Lebanon, of Israel and Palestine, of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and the rest of Central America; of Haiti and Cuba, of the Sudan and South Sudan, of northern Mozambique. I will soon visit the brothers in the Congo and above all in the east region, in Kivu, a very stormy region. I think of those brothers who live in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, south Philippines, Russia, and in different other parts of Latin America, as well as on the continents of Africa and Asia. It is not possible to name all of them.
A common characteristic is that the brothers remain close to their people, sharing with them the destiny, the difficulties, often the most just struggles for peace and justice. This also happens by exposing oneself personally.
Remaining close to people, to Christians and others is a way of translating the word of our Rule: the brothers who by divine inspiration go among the people… corresponds, in fact, to our vocation to go and remain among and with people, Christians and others. Our fraternal life is the first form of evangelization. It is also the opportunity to always return again to the center of our vocation. As the Constitutions remind us at art. 89 §1: “The witness of one’s life, or the silent proclamation of the kingdom of God, is a kind of initial step and the first method of evangelization. It can and must be given by all the friars, clerics and lay, by those who preach, pray or ‘work’, by the young and the old, by the healthy and the sick, in such a way that, as they live their life as minors in fraternity, they make known the fact that they are Christians.”
Here is the opportunity to return again and again to the center of our vocation.
This is truly one of the signs of the times of this era in which we are living, amidst a restless and very tested humanity in this moment of history. This is also an invitation to all of us, friars minor scattered throughout the world, not to forget that we live our evangelical vocation as brothers and minors in the concrete realities in which we live. Everywhere these realities are difficult, and the brothers living in more tense situations help us to remember this.
So we also have the precious opportunity to grow in the sense of belonging to the fraternity of the whole Order spread throughout the world. What the brothers experience on one continent or another affects us all and belongs to us. Therefore we make our own the anxieties and hopes, the joys and sufferings of the brothers living in the more tested areas of the world, also committing ourselves to get to know them better, to pray for them and to support them as much as possible.
