Your Eminence,
My dear Priests, Religious and Representatives of the Lay Organisations,

It gives me great pleasure to be able to meet you all, on this happy occasion of the Feast of dear Cardinal Michael Michai Kitbuncu, after having celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass for his Feast Day and having prayed too on the Sanctification Day of the Clergy of Bangkok.

The Lord has willed that my presence here, at the Baan Phu Waan Pastoral Centre of Samphran, to meet Their Excellencies the Presidents of the Episcopal Conferences of Asia, should coincide with these significant events, which characterise, not only the life of your beloved Pastor, but also a unique and providential time of grace, dedicated to the sanctification of the Clergy.

At this time I willingly join all of you, in expressing my warmest and most fraternal wishes for a happy feast day to our highly esteemed Cardinal, and to assure him of my prayers for him, as well as for the whole Church in Bangkok. The Lord, the One and Only High Priest, grants the most abundant graces of holiness to those whom he has called to be his ministers and the dispensers of his mysteries.

To Your Eminence, and to all of you, I bring the greetings and blessing of the Holy Father.

To you, my dear priests, I would like to say a special word of encouragement. You know that those who are "constituted in the order of priesthood by the sacrament of Orders, are bound together by an intimate sacramental brotherhood; (but) in a special way that they form one priestly body in the diocese" [Presb. Ord. 8]. You are asked to be closely united, in the Lord Jesus, with your Pastor, who is his representative. I ask you, furthermore, to be prepared in Doctrine as well as in being zealous pastors of your people. The Church of God has urgent need of Pastors. Increasing new throngs of people, tired and exhausted, disturb Jesus' slumber. They are sheep without a shepherd. Left alone they will be scattered, and may become the prey of rapacious wolves.

And because I am more and more convinced of the indispensable need of a "holy" priestly witness, I ask you to draw all your spiritual energy from that extraordinary source which is the Eucharist. The Church bears the Good News throughout the whole world, strengthened by the Holy Eucharist. May the Eucharist be your constant nourishment in your daily missionary endeavours. It will help you to keep away from the futile attractions of the material comforts of the modern world and avoid the danger of reducing the tremendous gift of your priesthood to being that of a functionary and bureaucrat of cult.

Priestly holiness determines the faith of the people, as well as being the secret of your happiness; know how to make capital out of this for your credibility by fully living it, making the gift of your whole self to the sheep who have been entrusted to you.

My dear religious, I now invite you, witnesses par excellence of good eschatology, to live the Beatitudes joyously, to witness to them in an effective way to those who are poor or who are afflicted and to those who have need of peace, here and elsewhere.

Do not let yourselves be dazzled by the power of human means that, also helpful, must never seem indispensable to you. Your sole resource for evangelisation is the strength that comes from Christ. The religious vocation "includes the task of devoting themselves wholly to "mission". Indeed, consecrated life itself, by the action of the Holy Spirit, is a mission, as was the whole of Jesus' life " [Vita Consecrata 72]. You are persons whose lives are an epiphany of the love of God and of a service to Mission.

To you, my dear faithful laity, I leave the encouraging words of the Holy Father, "God is preparing a great springtime for Christianity, and we can already see its first signs" [RM, 86]. Therefore, look ahead, with firmly based faith. And if in your witnessing you are somtimes discouraged, know that your initiatives have the "power" of the grain of mustard seed (cf. Lk. 13:19), and of the leaven hidden in the flour [cf. Lk. 13:20]. God knows how to perform great things through the courage of your faith and love. I pray that all of you may know how to launch "in altum" [out into the deep], aware of the greatness of your vocation as laity.

May the Blessed Virgin, the Star of Evangelisation, the Blessed Martyrs of Thailand and the Saints of the Churches of Asia watch over all of us. With these sentiments, I renew my best wishes to Your Eminence and I thank you
and wish you all the best.