“Never forget that Christ is alive and that He calls you to walk courageously behind Him.” Pope Francis gave this invitation this morning, April 30, to the Chemin Neuf Community and its Politics Fraternity, whom he received in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
“Dear friends,” he underscored, “I invite you to remain firm in your conviction and in your faith.”
“Never forget that Christ is alive and that He calls you to walk courageously behind Him. With Him, you are that flame that makes hope be born again in the heart of so many discouraged, sad young people without prospects.”
Calling on them to generate bonds of friendship and fraternal sharing for a better world, Francis reminded: “The Lord counts on your audacity, on your courage, on your enthusiasm.”
During the audience, the Holy Father thanked them for traveling to Rome, despite all the pandemic’s limitations and challenges, and encouraged their ongoing initiatives.
He expressed his hope that their “commitment and enthusiasm at the service of others, moulded by the strength of Christ’s Gospel may restore the taste of life and hope in the future to many people, in particular to many young people.”
Pope Francis concluded, entrusting each one of them and their families, as well as the members of your fraternity and all the young people they meet, to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and to the protection of Saint Ignatius.
“I bless you from my heart. Please, don’t forget to pray for me,” he said.
According to Vatican News, the Chemin Neuf Community is a Catholic community of couples, consecrated brothers and sisters, women and men from different cultures “who have chosen to live in community following Christ with an ecumenical vocation.” Established in 2014 in France, its Politics Fraternity “brings together young people between the ages of 18 -35 from different countries and political leanings, who share the same passion for the common good and desire to be active in politics according to the heart of God.”
Here is an Exaudi translation of the Pope’s greeting to those present at the meeting.
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The Holy Father’s Address
Dear Friends,
I welcome you, members of the Chemin Neuf’s [New Path’s] Political Fraternity and, through you, I express my heartfelt greeting to the young people of different countries that, like you, benefit from the competencies and the accompaniment of the Chemin Neuf Community. I thank you for having travelled to Rome, despite the limitations set by the pandemic.
With you I thank the Lord for the work of His Spirit, which is manifested in your human and spiritual journey at the service of the common good and of the poor, a path that you fulfil rejecting misery and working for a more just and fraternal world. In fact, in the unbridled rush to have, to a career, honors or power, the weak and the little are often ignored and rejected, or considered useless. Therefore, I hope that your commitment and your enthusiasm at the service of others, molded by the strength of Christ’s Gospel may restore the taste of life and hope in the future to many people, in particular to many young people.
“The lay vocation is first of all charity in the family and social and political charity: it is a concrete commitment from the faith for the building of a new society; it is to live in the midst of the world and of society to evangelize their different milieus to make peace, coexistence, justice, human rights, and mercy grow and thus extend the Kingdom of God in the world” (Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christus Vivit, 168). It is in fact in this dynamic that you walk, with an ecumenical openness and a heart willing to accept the different cultures and traditions, in order to transform the face of our society.
Dear friends, I encourage you not to be afraid to go on the paths of fraternity and to build bridges between persons, between peoples, in a world where so many walls are erected out of fear of others. Through your initiatives, your projects and your activities, you render visible a poor Church, with and for the poor, a Church going forth, which makes herself close to people in situations of suffering, of precariousness, of marginalization and exclusion. In fact, “from our faith in Christ — who made Himself poor, and always close to the poor and the excluded –, stems the concern for the integral development of the most abandoned of society” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 186).
Along with the young people of your societies, today more than ever you face challenges in which the state of health of our common home is at stake. It is truly about an ecological conversion, which recognizes the eminent dignity of every person, his value, his creativity and his capacity to seek and promote the common good. What we are living at present with the pandemic teaches us, concretely, that we are all in the same boat and that we will only be able to overcome the difficulties if we agree to work together. And you are spending a few days here in Rome precisely to reflect on a particular aspect of life in our common home: that of the presence of migrants and their reception in today’s Europe. In fact, you know it well, “when there is talk of migrants and the displaced too often we stop at the numbers. But it’s not about numbers; it’s about people! If we meet them we will come to know them and, knowing their stories and then we will be able to understand (Message for the 106th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, May 15, 2020).
Dear friends, I invite you to remain firm in your conviction and in your faith. Never forget that Christ is alive and that He calls you to walk courageously behind Him. With Him, you are that flame that makes hope be born again in the heart of so many discouraged, sad young people without prospects. May you be able to generate bonds of friendship, of fraternal sharing for a better world. The Lord counts on your audacity, on your courage, on your enthusiasm.
I entrust each one of you and your families, as well as the members of your fraternity and all the young people you meet, to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and to the protection of Saint Ignatius. I bless you from my heart. Please, don’t forget to pray for me.
[Original text: Italian] [Exaudi’s translation by Virginia M. Forrester]
