Each year, World Grandparents Day invites us to reflect on those who are often silently present in our families and communities. However, Pope Leo XIV’s message for this year proposes going beyond a simple tribute or occasional celebration. He poses a question that profoundly challenges the life of the Church:  what place do our older adults truly occupy in its mission?

During his pontificate, Pope Francis taught us to see grandparents as the roots of humanity and faith. On numerous occasions, he reminded us that they were the ones who transmitted history, tradition, and the Gospel from generation to generation. “The elderly are the ones who bring us history, they bring us doctrine, they bring us faith, and they give it to us as an inheritance,” he affirmed. He also strongly warned that “a people that does not care for its grandparents and does not treat them well is a people without a future.”

Those words still resonate powerfully. Many of us took our first steps in faith with a grandparent. We learned a prayer, made the sign of the cross, or discovered God’s love through their simple, everyday witness. Francis helped us understand that without memory there is no identity, and that without roots no tree can grow.

Leo XIV embraced this same heritage and projected it toward a new pastoral horizon. In his message for the Fifth World Day of Grandparents and Older Persons, he took as his motto the words of the prophet Isaiah:  “I will not forget you” (Is 49:15) . God does not abandon those who grow old; on the contrary, he continues to call them and entrust them with a mission.

But the Pope goes a step further. It is no longer enough to recognize the value of the elderly or to thank them for their contributions. He invites the entire Church to experience a true  “revolution of gratitude and care ,” capable of transforming our communities into genuine families where no one is left alone, forgotten, or discarded.

In a culture that often equates a person’s worth with their productivity, Leo XIV reminds us that old age is not a time of uselessness but of fruitfulness. The elderly continue to be evangelizers. They continue to sustain the life of the Church with their prayer, their experience, their capacity to listen, and their hope. The mission does not end with gray hair; it simply changes form.

This call has enormous pastoral power. Perhaps the challenge is no longer simply to organize a celebration for grandparents once a year. Perhaps we should ask ourselves if we know the elderly who live alone in our neighborhood, if we know who has stopped participating in the community because they can no longer get around, who needs a visit, a conversation, Communion, or simply someone to remind them that they are still part of God’s family.

Here, Leo XIV’s message encounters one of the great challenges of the synodal Church. A community that walks together leaves no one behind. Synodality is not merely about meeting or dialoguing; it becomes visible when we learn to care for those at risk of becoming invisible.

That is why the Pope proposes a concrete gesture: visiting an elderly person. Not as an act of charity, but as an experience of encountering Christ. The visit ceases to be a simple act of mercy and becomes a journey of faith. Wherever someone listens, accompanies, and shares a moment with an older person, the Church makes God’s love present.

Francis taught us that grandparents are our roots. Leo XIV now invites us to nurture those roots so that they may continue to give life. These are two distinct voices expressing the same conviction: a Church that forgets its elders loses part of its memory, its identity, and its hope.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate this World Day is not simply to share a photograph with our grandparents or offer them kind words. Perhaps the most authentic tribute is to ring the doorbell of that elderly person who lives alone, sit down to listen to their story, and discover, once again, that God never ceases to speak through those who have walked the path of life before us.

Because, after all, a Church that learns to care for its elders is a Church that learns to become a little more like the family that Jesus dreamed of.