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April 8, 2024With this celebration my second pastoral visit to your parish dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi ends. These have been very intense days for me. I had the opportunity to meet many of you: the representatives of the various ministries in the parish. Many of you carry out a precious ministry: the catechists, altar servers, lectors, extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, ushers, the choir, those who prepare the liturgy, those who take care of the maintenance and finances of the parish. I had the opportunity to meet representatives of many associations, movements and communities, I met representatives of youth groups. I had the joy of being able to greet the linguistic communities within the various Eucharistic celebrations. I met the parish priest and the assistant priests. This evening, I will finally meet the parish pastoral council.
You are a beautiful parish; you are a very lively community. My pastoral visit this year, took place during Easter week and was marked by the joy of Jesus' resurrection. This allowed us to reflect first and foremost into the great mystery of our baptism. In fact, the paschal mystery itself reminds us that with baptism we are united with Christ, his death and resurrection. With baptism we receive our fundamental vocation, the vocation to be children of God, the vocation to holiness, to love and be loved. Every other vocation, to marriage, to ministerial priesthood and to consecrated life, has its root in baptism. None of us live on this earth by chance, we are not numbers in a series resulting from evolution. We are all wanted and called by name, one by one, and we are on this earth for a mission: to bear witness to the joy of Christ's resurrection.
Furthermore, baptism makes all of us a single family, the family of God. We come from many different nations, we have different languages and traditions, but we form a single people of God. For this reason, we are called to walk united in love.
The pastoral visit ends today, while we celebrate another very important feast, the annunciation of the angel to Mary: it is the feast that tells us about the incarnation of the son of God. We began the pastoral visit by celebrating the fulfillment of our salvation with Easter, we end the pastoral visit by celebrating the beginnings of salvation: the angel's annunciation to Mary. A Father of the Church, Gregory of Nyssa, said that the son of God became flesh precisely to be able to face the paschal mystery, to be able to die for us. In fact as God, Jesus could not die. He took our human nature from Mary so that he could give his life for us and die on the cross and free us from evil. Jesus took human nature to be able to rise from the dead and bring our humanity into God, into divine life.
We heard the passage from the angel Gabriel's announcement to Mary. We are moved to see that the son of God asked permission from a woman to take on our human nature. Jesus knocked on the doors of a young woman to enter the world.
Mary is the woman of listening and faith. She was able to fully accept God's will and welcomed Jesus into her body to be able to give him to us. We cannot think of Jesus without thinking of Mary, because it is through her that the Word of God became flesh.
In the same way we discover that we too are truly important to God, because Jesus continues his mission in the world through those who, like Mary, welcome the word of God and bring it to everyone. The annunciation makes us understand the great responsibility that we all have in the Church. Like Mary we too are called to say yes to God's plan for us.
Dear ones, I entrust you to Mary's motherly protection. Be a parish aware of the many gifts you have, many different gifts, but at the same time be a united parish. Don't limit yourself only to the interest of particular communities. Take on each other's problems.
Finally, I ask you to take great care in transmitting the faith to the new generations. Don't be afraid to listen to the questions and wishes of young people. These questions will help us to convey the faith in Jesus with greater conviction, because Jesus knows what is in everyone's heart and he knows how to give us the true answer to the heart of every woman and every man.
Let us help young people discover their personal vocation. May the Lord inspire among our young people a vocation to the priesthood, to the consecrated life and to marriage.
Finally, I thank all your priests, I thank the parish priest Father Antony and all the others who I see are very involved in the pastoral care of the different linguistic communities and at the service of all the faithful. I thank them for their commitment. I ask you to pray for your priests, so that they may always be ministers according to the heart of Christ, the Good Shepherd.
Be close to those who are far away, to those who, despite being baptized, have forgotten that they are children of God and live far from the Church. Let's help them rediscover the beauty of the Christian life.
May Most Holy Mary, who welcomed the word of God into her womb through the announcement of the angel and the Word that became flesh in her, support your parish journey. May the Mother of God help us, so that we know how to welcome Jesus and bring him first and foremost into our families, into our communities, into our work and school environments through the humble testimony of life.
Jesus who died for us on the cross, is truly risen, and will never leave us alone, he will always be with us every day until the end of the world, hallelujah.
