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INTENTION : |
We pray that Church movements and groups may rediscover their mission of evangelisation each day, placing their own charisms at the service of those who are in need in the world.
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Ecclesial movements and new communities
The annual meeting of lay associations, Church movements, and new communities was held in Rome on 16 September 2021, and Pope Francis addressed those present.
"Dear brothers and sisters, good morning and welcome!
As members of associations of the faithful, international ecclesial movements and other communities, you have a genuinely ecclesial mission. With devotion, you endeavour to live out and make fruitful those charisms that the Holy Spirit, through your founders, granted to all the members of your groups to benefit the Church and many men and women to whom you dedicate yourselves in the apostolate.
I think especially of those who, finding themselves in the existential peripheries of our societies, experience abandonment and solitude in their own flesh, and suffer due to their many material needs and moral and spiritual poverty.
It will do us all good to remember not only the poverty of others, but also our own, every day. There is something about Mother Teresa that often comes to mind.
She was a religious sister, but this happens to us all if we focus on the street, not on God. Sometimes when we go to pray and we feel nothing. I call this spiritual atheism, when everything is dark, and everything seems to say: "I have failed; this is not the way.
Poor Mother Teresa suffered greatly because it is the devil's revenge that we go there, to the peripheries where Jesus is, indeed where Jesus was born, wasn't He? We prefer a sophisticated Gospel, a distilled Gospel. But this is not the Gospel.
But the real Gospel is that we are challenged to think of various forms of poverty.
We are sinners, yet God gives us the grace to recognise our sins, ask to see a confessor, and go for Confession. This is a great grace: do not lose it ... though there are limits, you have a more evident sign of the vitality of the Church. You represent a missionary force and a presence of prophecy that gives us hope for the future. You, along with the pastors and all the other lay faithful, are responsible for building the future of the holy faithful people of God. But remember that building the future does not mean discarding the present!
On the contrary, the future must be prepared here and now, "in the kitchen", learning to listen and to discern the present time with honesty and courage and with the willingness to engage in a constant encounter with the Lord, a constant personal conversion.
Otherwise, one runs the risk of living in a "parallel world", distilled, distant, far from the real challenges of society, of culture and of all those who live alongside you and await your Christian witness.
Indeed, belonging to an association, a movement or a community, primarily if they refer to a charism, should not lock us up "safe and sound" and make us feel secure as if there were no need for any response to challenges and changes.
We Christians are always on the move, in conversion and in discernment. And so often, we find so-called "pastoral agents": bishops, priests, nuns, and compromised lay people.
I do not like the word that the "laity" is "compromised" or "not compromised". The laity is active in something. But some confuse the journey with a tourist trip or confuse the journey with always turning in on oneself without being able to move forward.
The Gospel journey is not a tourist trip. It is a challenge: every step is a challenge, and every step is a call from God. Always move forward. We are always on the move, in conversion, and discerning to do God's will. Thinking we are "new" in the Church - a temptation that often happens to new congregations or movements - and therefore not needing any change can become a false security. Even novelties soon get old!
For this reason, the charism to which we belong must be furthered more and more, and we must constantly reflect together to incarnate it in our new situations. To do this well requires great docility and humility. To recognise our limitations and accept to change outdated ways of doing and thinking, or methods of the apostolate that are no longer effective, or forms of organisation of inner life that have proved inadequate or even harmful.
For example, this is one of the services that General Chapters always do; when they are not good, you must revise them, right? ... in the assembly, I don't know what you call them.
Bulletin of the Holy See Press Office, 16 September 2021
The Eucharistic Youth Movement (EYM)
The Eucharistic Youth Movement (EYM) is an international Church Movement for the Christian formation of children and young people of both sexes, from 5 to 25. It seeks to teach them to live in Jesus' way by guiding them into a loving, "heart-to-heart" relationship with him based on a Eucharistic spirituality.
It prepares them to live as Christian adults, committed to serving their brothers and sisters in an unjust and secularised world. The EYM is the junior branch of the Apostleship of Prayer, an association entrusted by the Church to the Society of Jesus.
It is the renewed form of the old Eucharistic Crusade, which had great success in many countries around the middle of the last century. This renewal began in France in 1962, giving the Movement this new name, followed by other countries worldwide. Present in 51 countries on all five continents, the EYM is structured on clear lines of action, stages of Christian growth and central national coordination.
By a methodology based on the formation of communities, with a clear sense of the Church, through the experience of prayer, Eucharist, the Word of God and discernment, young people are led to a life of service, attentive to the needs of today's world.
"We are young people who want to tell the world that our youthful joy springs from our encounter with God, from disinterested love, from looking at our history with hope, from Jesus' plan, which fires us and moves us to act."
From the Latin American EYM Manual
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