On the occasion of the 34th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, which began last Sunday morning in Rimini under the theme The Emergency of Man, the Holy Father, Pope Francis sent a special message to the Bishop of Rimini, His Excellency, Francesco Lambiasi, which was dispatched by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone last Sunday morning.
Message
of His Holiness, Pope Francis
To the Bishop of Rimini
On the occasion of the 34th
Meeting
For Friendship Among Peoples
Your Excellency,
With joy, I send the cordial greetings of the Holy
Father, Pope Francis to Your Excellency, to the organizers and all the
participants who are taking part in the Meeting for Friendship among Peoples,
which is gathering for the 34th time. The theme chosen – The Emergency of Man – intersects with the great urgency for
evangelization about which on many occasions, our Holy Father, as well as his
predecessors, have spoken. This subject
is one of great concern for him.
Man is the way of the Church, as Blessed John Paul II
wrote in his first Encyclicial, Redemptorhominis (cf. n. 14). This truth
remains valid also and above all in our time as the
Church - in an ever more globalized and virtual world, in
a society ever more secularized and lacking stable points of reference – is
called to rediscover her proper mission, focusing on the essential and seeking
new roads for evangelization.
Man remains a mystery, irreducible to whatever image is
formed of him in society and that worldly power tries to impose. He is a
mystery of freedom and of grace, of poverty and of grandeur. But what does it
mean to say that man is the way of the
Church? And above all, what does it mean for us to travel along this way
today?
Man is the way of the Church because he is the way
traveled by God himself. From the dawn of humanity, after the fall, God went in
search of man. Where are you? he asks
Adam, who hides in the garden (Gn 3:9). This question, which appears at the
beginning of the Book of Genesis, and that does not cease to echo throughout
the rest of the Bible and in every moment of the history that God, in the
course of the millennia, has constructed with humanity, achieves its highest
expression in the incarnation of the Son. Saint Augustine states in his commentary
on the Gospel of John: Remaining with the
Father, [the Son] was truth and life; clothing himself in our flesh, he became
the way (I, 34, 9). Jesus Christ is therefore the principal way of the Church, but because he is also the way of each man, man becomes
the primary and fundamental way of the
Church (cf. Redemptor hominis, 13-14).
I am the gate,
says Jesus (Jn 10:7): that is, I am the way into every man and every thing. If
we do not pass through Christ, if we do not concentrate the gaze of our heart
upon him, we will not understand anything about the mystery of man. And so,
almost inadvertently, we will be forced to borrow our criteria of judgment and
action from the world, and every time that we encounter our brothers in humanity,
we will be like those thieves and
brigands of whom Jesus speaks in the Gospel (cf. Jn 10:8). The world too,
in its way, is interested in man. Economic, political, and media power need man
to perpetuate themselves and grow. And for this reason they seek to manipulate
the masses, to induce desires, to eliminate man’s most precious possession: his
relationship with God. Power is afraid of those who are in dialogue with God
because that makes them free and inassimilable.
This then is the state of emergency of the human person
that the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples places at the center of its
reflection: the urgency of restoring man to himself, to his highest dignity, to
the uniqueness and preciousness of every human existence from conception to
natural death. It is necessary to
consider again man’s sacredness and at the same time to say that it in the
relationship with God, that is, in the discovery and adhesion to his vocation,
that man can grow to his true stature. The Church, to whom Christ entrusted his
Word and his Sacraments, safeguards the greatest hope, the most authentic
possibility of self-realization for man, in any place and in any time. What a
great responsibility we have! Let us not keep this precious treasure for
ourselves, which everyone is seeking whether or not they are aware of it. Let
us courageously go out to meet the men and women of our time, the children and
the elderly, the wise and the uneducated, young people and families. Let us go
out to meet everyone without waiting for them to come to us! In this let us
imitate our divine Master, who left his heaven to become man and be near to
each one of us. Let us bring the perfume of the love of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 2:15)
not only to the churches and the parishes but everywhere: schools,
universities, workplaces, hospitals, prisons; but also in the piazzas, the
streets, the gyms, wherever people gather. We must not be stingy in giving what
we have received without merit! We must not be afraid to announce Christ in
season and out (cf. 2 Tim 4:2), with respect and boldness.
This is the task of the Church, this is the task of every
Christian: serving man, seeking him out even in the most hidden social and
spiritual corners. The condition of credibility of the Church in this mission
of hers as mother and teacher is, however, her fidelity to Christ. Openness to the
world is accompanied, and in a certain sense made possible, by obedience to the
truth that the Church herself does not control. The emergency of the human person, then, means the emergency of
returning to Christ, to learn from him the truth about ourselves and the world,
and with him and in him go out to encounter men, above all the poor, for whom
Jesus always manifested a predilection. And poverty is not only material. There
is also a spiritual poverty that grips contemporary man. We are poor in love,
thirsty for truth and justice, beggars of God, as the Servant of God MonsignorLuigi Giussani always stressed. The greatest poverty is, in fact, the lack of
Christ, and until we have brought Jesus to men we will always have done too
little for them.
Excellency, I hope that these brief thoughts can be of
use to those who will take part in the Meeting. His Holiness, Pope Francis
assures everyone of his closeness in prayer and his affection; he hopes that
the gatherings and reflections of these days can light a flame in the hearts of
the all the participants, one that feeds and supports their witness to the
Gospel in the world. And from his heart he sends to you, to the leaders and
organizers of this event, and to all present, a special apostolic blessing.
I too add my cordial greeting and I take this opportunity
to confirm my most distinct sentiments of respect for your Most Reverend
Excellency, most devoted in the Lord.
Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone
Vatican Secretary of State
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