General Council: “Happy Feast days to all”

“For there is a child born for us, and this is the name they’ll give him:
Wonder Counsellor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace,
And in him will be blessed all the Nations of the worlds.” (Is 9,6; Ps 71,17)

Dear confreres,
In the name of the General Administration and of the whole Institute we wish you a Holy Christmas and a New Year full of missionary graces.

To behold the mystery of the incarnation of God in our history is to remember a God who manifested himself with a concrete human face, born in a time and a place. His incarnation shows us that salvation passes through love, acceptance, respect for each person in his ethnic, languages, cultures diversity, but they are all brothers and human beings.

The year on Interculturality that we have gone through, reflected, prayed and celebrated, confirms to us that our differences are not a harm or a danger, but a wealth. It’s like the artist who wants to make a mosaic: it’s better to have tiles of many colours, rather than a few. And so we are in our individuality and in our diversity, a cenacle of apostles, as St. Daniel Comboni said: “This Institute, then, becomes like a little Cenacle of Apostles for Africa, a centre of light sending to the centre of Africa as many rays as are the Missionaries who go out from it....” (W 2648).

The community, the cenacle, is a project, lifestyle and realisation, but the goal is the Kingdom, understood as a completely new lifestyle, among the most abandoned people. Comboni speaks of rays that emanate from the centre of the cenacle and shine bringing warmth where it is needed.

It is from this community that we live as a Cenacle of Apostles who send the luminous rays of witness to our life, to our faith: it is the light of the child Jesus whom we have welcomed as a gift, and whom we bring to all peoples in the missionary service that we carry out as an Institute in the Church. It is the zeal of the heart of the Good Shepherd that reaches the whole of humanity, bringing warmth where it is needed, to the poorest and most abandoned.

It is the witness of the “... new creation, new heavens and new earth where justice dwells that, justifying every person by grace, makes them all brothers, abolishing borders, walls, hatred. ... In Christ there are no longer foreigners or guests, but all coheirs and partners in the same grace: the gift of his Spirit, with whom God creates the new humanity, an endless humanity that no one could count, composed of people from ‘every nation, tribe, people and language’, who recognise that salvation belongs to God (not to an institution) and to the Lamb (Apoc. 7, 9-10). It is the mature fruit of the gift of the Spirit given at Pentecost”. (Letter on Interculturality).

Without this gift of fraternity that the child Jesus has brought us, our efforts for a more just world are short lived, and even the best projects risk becoming lifeless structures.

For this reason, our wish for a Merry Christmas is a wish for fraternity. Fraternity among people from every nation, culture, language and peoples. Fraternity among us. Fraternity among people who are able to respect themselves and to listen to others.

This Christmas let us rediscover the bonds of fraternity that unite us as human beings and that bind all peoples. May the Lord find in our hearts a welcoming home, the Common House, and well-disposed to let Him always live and to receive everyone. May He be the Light who guides our steps as we journey towards our brothers and sisters.

Happy Feast days to all.
The General Council