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Message of the 13th General Assembly
Dear Confrere,
At the general
audience of May 30, 2007, Pope Benedict 16th,
addressing us, said: “I greet the members of the Pontifical
Institute for Foreign Missions, gathered in these days for their
General Chapter, and I and I hope that this important assembly
is stimulus and encouragement for all to be eloquent signs of
God’s love and missionaries of His peace”.
The words of the
Holy Father, at the end of our General Assembly, express very
well the spirit that animated our work. More than once, during
the Assembly, we said that the mission is for those who dare,
for those who know how to take up the challenges of the present
day with realism and with courage, looking forward to the future
with optimism.
We realized once
again, on one hand, of the growing demands and complexity of
evangelization and, on the other hand, the difficulty that our
Institute is experiencing due to the reduction in the number of
its members, of advancing in age, of our limits and of the
difficulty of working together.
The work we
undertook in these days gives us great hope and encouragement.
We felt a strong sense of unity among ourselves, feeling that
each of us is responsible for the life and the future of our
family of apostles.
Wanting to make
everyone a participant and each of us of the same experience of
unity, the General Assembly has put together a plan of action
that requires every circumscription and every missionary to
bring it to implementation. The General Assembly didn’t want to
merely communicate the decisions taken but- perhaps for the
first time –decided to map out the next six years, giving the
opportunity for both a community and personal renewal. This was
not to put down but to emphasize the gifts each member has in
service to the missions.
In the next six
years, we are called to become more and more a family of
missionaries, a community of persons that work together taking
part, without reservations, in the challenge of renewing the
Institute and of communal planning that the General Assembly has
called for.
On the feast of
the Visitation of Mary, the day that we have come to the end of
our Assembly, we pray to her that she may continue to accompany
us, that we, like her, can bring Jesus to the world.
The members of the 13th General Assembly
Arricia, May 31, 2007
Feast of the Visitation
(Unofficial Translation)
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