He Pope Francis received this Thursday at the Vatican a group of seminarians from the dioceses of Pamplona, Tudela, San Sebastian and the seminar Redemptoris Materwho gave him a handkerchief Saint Fermin and a figure of the saint.
The hearing was marked by proximity to the pontiff and his message was centered on the priestly vocation as a liberating mission.
During the meeting, the The Holy Father expressed his joy for receiving the seminarians and shared a speech full of spiritual depth, in which he highlighted the importance of being at the service of the most vulnerable, including those who are imprisoned, not only physically, but also by ideological and social.
Words from Pope Francis to seminarians
“Hello, I welcome you, seminarians of Pamplona and San Sebastian. Your archbishop was very enthusiastic about this audience and told me that you appealed to the affection I have for prisons, such that I would grant you this audience as well. The seminary is not a prison, it is a place to learn that a priest is a man, a human being who wants to redeem, like your Mercedarian archbishop, a redeemer of captives; for a priest cannot be anything other than a living image of Jesus, the Redeemer in capital letters.
This means many things, but a very specific one is that we have to go down to the prisons; to government prisons, certainly, to offer those who find themselves there the oil of consolation and the wine of hope, but also to all those prisons which lock up the men and women of our society: the ideological prisons, the moral prisons, those that create exploitation, discouragement, ignorance and forgetting of God.
I’m going back to the prisons; Please go to the prisons, go get engaged. Since I became a bishop, on Maundy Thursday, I wash my feet in a prison. They are the ones who need their feet washed the most, as if to say to them: ‘Look, I wash your feet because I’m worse than you, but I was lucky that they didn’t ‘didn’t catch.’
I remember that during a foot washing –this prison was for women—, I was washing one woman’s feet and as I was about to move on to the other, she grabbed my hand, came close to my ear and said to me: “Father, I killed my son “. The internal dramas in the consciousness of those who live in prison. When you’re a priest, go to prisons, it’s a priority. And we can all say what I feel: why them and not me?
You are going to receive the priestly anointing and it is to free the captives, those who are chained, without realize (cf. Lk 4:18). Chained by so many things: by culture, by society, by vices, by hidden sins.
Well, you’re going to get that written. I leave it to the bishop, so that he can let him know. This way I don’t waste time on something I won’t hear about again in a while. Better go ask questions.
Second part of the speech delivered before the Archbishop
“In the fourth chapter of his Gospel, Saint Luke makes a good meditation for the preparation of future priests, which I propose: speaks to us of docility to the Spiritto make a desert to find God, emptying ourselves of so many things that we carry like burdens. This encourages us not to be afraid to face the temptation of an idolatrous ministry of which we are at the center, in search of material power or applause.
The chapter continues by saying that Jesus went to Nazarethhis land, aware that in the eyes of the world he was only the son of Joseph, one like us. Never forget these roots, do not forget that you are the children of the People. This text from Luke also teaches us that in our apostolate we cannot make distinctions between people, even if they are strangers or even enemies, because for God we are all his children. When we look at our brother, let us recognize in him his availability to receive the grace that the Lord offers him.
In another passage, the Lord grieves, is indignant at the hardness of heart of his contemporaries who did not understand Jesus’ request to free a woman bound by an evil spirit for many years (cf. Lk 13:16). You, on the contrary, are always ready to bless, to liberate, and when you feel the hands that He has anointed are paralyzed, stretch them out with confidence like the cripple in the Gospel of Mark (cf. 3, 5). This is what Jesus did on the Cross, engraving our wound in his Heart and in his arm, destroying our death with his love and crossing with his Passion the abyss that separated us from God (cf. Canticle 8, 6 ).
So be courageous, selfless and tireless in bringing the divine mercy that the Lord has so generously poured out on you in choosing you for this ministry. May He bless you and may the Blessed Virgin take care of you.”
The value of the priestly mission
The Pope’s message underlined the responsibility of future priests to be living symbols of Jesus in the world and to reach out to the most disadvantaged. The seminarians, excited, grateful to the Holy Father for his words and for the opportunity of this audience which will be marked in their spiritual formation.
