Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – “Vocation pastoral care is for every diocese a pastoral priority which assumes even greater importance in the context of the Year of the Priesthood which has just begun” said the Holy Father Benedict XVI when he received in audience on Saturday 4 July, to representatives of the European Vocations Service (EVS), the body of the Council of Bishops’ Conferences of Europe for the care and monitoring of vocations in the Church in Rome for the annual congress this year on the theme: “Sowing the Gospel of vocation”: a Word Who calls and sends " (Rome, 2-5 July 2009).
Addressing vocations delegates of the 34 Catholic Bishops' Conference of Europe, the Pope recalled the Gospel parable of the sower, the central theme of the congress: “With abundance and gratuitousness the Lord throws the seed of the Word of God, aware that it can encounter inadequate soil, which will not allow it to mature because of aridity or, which will extinguish its vital force suffocating it among thorny bushes… The image of soil can evoke the reality more or less good of the family; the environment sometimes arid and hard of work; days of suffering and of tears. The soil is above all the human heart, especially the heart of young people to whom you address your service of counselling and care: a heart often confused and disorientated, yet able to contain unthinkable energies for donation; ready to open in the shoots of a life spent for love of Jesus, able to follow Him with totality and certainty which comes from having found the greatest treasure of life. Only the Lord sows in the human heart. Only after abundant and generous sowing of the Word of God can we take the paths of accompanying and educating, forming and discerning.”
After recalling other words of Jesus - "unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest" (Jn 12,24) - the Pope said “like Christ, the priest and the animator must be ‘grain of wheat' which renounces self to do the will of the Father; which is able to live way from clamour and noise; who renounces that search for visibility and greatness of image which today often become the criteria and even the goal of life in much of our culture, and attract many young people”.
The Pontiff encouraged the participants at the Congress with these words: “Dear Friends, sow confidence and hope. Profound in fact is the sense of confusion among many young people today. Not rarely human words are without future or prospects, without meaning and wisdom. There is a spreading attitude of frenetic impatience and incapacity to live the time of waiting. Yet, this can be the hour of God: his call, mediated by the power and the effectiveness of the Word, generates a path of hope towards fullness of life … This is the message which comes to us from the Year of St Paul which we have just concluded. St Paul, won by Christ, fostered and formed vocations, as we see clearly from the greetings in his letters, which mention the names of men and women who worked with him at the service of the Gospel. This is also the message of the Year of the Priesthood, just started: the saintly Cure of Ars, Jean Marie Vianney – who is a ‘beacon’ of this new spiritual itinerary – was a priest who dedicated his life to the spiritual guidance of people, with humility and simplicity”.
In the last part of his discourse, Benedict XVI emphasised that the Year of the Priesthood offers “a splendid opportunity for rediscovering the profound meaning of vocation pastoral care, and its fundamental choice of methods: witness, simple and credible; communion, itineraries concerted and shared in the Particular Church; daily routine which educates to follow the Lord in every day life; listening, guided by the Holy Spirit, to orient young persons in their search for God and true happiness; and lastly truth, which alone can generate interior freedom ”. The Pope concluded: “May the Lord's Word dwell within you always, may it renew in your hearts the light, love and peace which God alone can give, and render you capable of being witnesses and announcers of the Gospel the source of communion and love ”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 6/7/2009; righe 46, parole 699)
