This Saturday morning, Francisco received members of the Scalabrian religious families in audience. The tragedy of migration caused by wars, hunger, poverty and environmental problems is before everyone’s eyes and it is necessary to spread a “mentality of proximity, care and acceptance”. And addressing the religious, Francis added: “Without prayer there is no mission.”
Mário Galgano – Vatican City
Migration is not a “casual community migration”, but often a drama. And just as everyone has the right to migrate, everyone also has the right to stay in their country and live there in peace and dignity. But the tragedy of forced migration due to war, hunger, poverty and environmental problems is now visible to all.
Francis addressed the religious men and women who will succeed Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, canonized in 2022, “as missionaries among migrants” and spoke again about the phenomenon of migration. The Bishop of Piacenza, who lived between the 19th and 20th centuries, taught the consecrated men and women of the congregations he founded to care for those who leave their homeland in search of a better future, calling them ” “Brothers and Sisters on the Way for Unity.” So what can we learn from this? The Pope said this in the audience:
“Scalabrini helps us by seeing migrant missionaries as collaborators with the Holy Spirit for unity. He has an enlightened and original vision of the migratory phenomenon, which he sees as a call to create community in charity.”
The church home for all people
When Dom Scalabrini met the eyes of many Italian migrants on their way to America, he felt the call to “help these people materially and spiritually, so that none of them, left to themselves, would become lost and lose their faith”. Over the centuries, countless people set off towards the unknown on “horses, carts, litters, mules and dromedaries, to which today we could add barges, trucks and boats”.
The saint described “Jerusalem as the city of peace and the Church as the homeland of all people, where the life of all is sacred and precious.” Here the Pope addressed an appeal to everyone to “educate hearts rich in catholicity, that is, passionate about universality and unity, encounter and communion”. According to the Pope, it is important for him to spread a mentality of proximity. It’s a matter of proximity:
“This keyword is the style of God always close: a spirituality, a mentality of care and acceptance, and of growing the civilization of love in the world, in the words of Saint Paul VI. to accept. However, it would be utopian to pretend that all this could be achieved through human power alone.”
God-led action in history
For Francisco it is necessary to “collaborate with the work of the Spirit” and “act in history under the guidance and with the energy that comes from God” and thus “let ourselves be conquered by his infinite tenderness to follow his desires to feel and act in ways which are not always ours.” And he added:
“We must recognize God abroad, remember that the Old Testament calls us to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger, adds the Pope, and find in God the strength to love freely.”
And then he made a second appeal that the holy Bishop of Piacenza makes to us when he insists on the need for the missionary to have a loving relationship with Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, and to cultivate it especially through the celebrated and adored Eucharist:
“I emphasize the word ‘adored’. I think we have lost the meaning of worship. And we have prayers to do something or… beautiful prayers, but… in silence, in adoration. The modern mentality has taken away some of that feeling of adoration. Bring it back, please bring it back.
There is no mission without prayer
Scalabrini never neglected Eucharistic adoration, “despite the tiredness of hard work”, and this teaches that “without prayer there is no mission”, explained the Pope, who invited missionaries to express their “commitment to migrants to renew it and root it and deepen it more and more in an intense spiritual life.” Finally, Francisco expressed “great gratitude” to all the Scalabrians for their work around the world, which he himself witnessed “from Buenos Aires”.
(Vatican news)