This year the Church has chosen Missionary Church, Witness of Mercyas the theme for World Mission Sunday. And this is the way we are approaching and taking up this invitation as the Hospitaller Family…
Dear Co-workers, Volunteers, Sisters and Brothers:
This year the Church has chosen Missionary Church, Witness of Mercyas the theme for World Mission Sunday. And this is the way we are approaching and taking up this invitation as the Hospitaller Family, called to be witnesses to the living presence of the compassionate and merciful Christ of the Gospel among us all. This embodies the philosophy of a mission, viewed as a gift of God and an inescapable responsibility to History, for the good of humanity. It is a source of inspiration and a way to move forward, that has become the patrimony of our Hospitaller institutions.
And it is from this viewpoint that we have proposed the words of the Saint Luke “Sent by Jesus to proclaim the Kingdom and to heal the sick”(cf. Lk. 9, 1-2)on which to reflect during our Missionary-Hospitaller Week of Prayer.
Let us read this text from the perspective of Hospitality, which is our core value, expressed in terms of Love, outreach, service, brotherhood, solidarity, justice, defending human life, freely-given service, acceptance of others and allowing ourselves to be accepted, reciprocity, free-giving, and surprise (Heb.13,2), and other values which we will offer for your consideration every day of the week to prompt us to renew our creativity in the way we express our Missionary-Hospitaller commitment.
Values are not served to us on a silver salver, but have to be discovered. We must redeem our values, trying to ensure that they are present in every sphere of life and action, so as to prevent the deterioration of the quality of life and social relations turning society into a mass of anonymous individuals. Without values, we are not human beings.
Values spring from a living and committed relationship into which every person enters with the world in which they live. Values are always bound up with creative life, which is the life of participation, love and meeting others -the life of the Spirit2. To discover that helping aperson with a disability bears within it some great value it is not necessary to read treaties on compassion; what has to be done is to get down to work, to reach out to needy people and be committed to their situation. This commitment means that we have to set aside personal interests, leave behind us places which, for us, are of purely ephemeral value, and go out to find the gift of God, which is his Spirit that makes us living beings.
