The bishops gathered in Benevento
Photo: CEI
ROME, August 30, 2021 / 3:00 PM (ACI Print).-
“It is necessary that the parishes and all the ecclesial realities become more and more a training ground for Christian life and schools of services to others, especially the needy who await concrete gestures of solidarity”.
Papa Francis writes this in the message to the participants in the Meeting of the Bishops of the “Inner Areas”, which is held in Benevento on 30 and 31 August on the initiative of the Archbishop, Felice Accrocca.
The event, in which more than twenty Bishops from the Dioceses of Piedmont, Umbria, Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, Sicily take part, wants to start a common debate to develop a plan for the pastoral relaunch of the “areas internal ”of the country, which increasingly find themselves dealing with marginalization, depopulation and the economic crisis.
“Do not allow yourselves to be paralyzed by difficulties but always set out on the road”, the Pope writes. Be “always open and available to others. Our time is characterized by indifference individualism that determines loneliness the waste of many existences “ and the “The Christian response does not lie in the resigned observation of today’s poverty of values, in the nostalgic regret of the past, but in the charity that, animated by hope, knows how to look at today with tenderness and with humility, makes all things new”.
In his introductory report, the Secretary General of the CEI said: “There are no Serie A communities and Serie B communities in the Church and if each is called to carry out its mission to the full, none can pretend to do without the other ”.