The Italian Jesuit journal La Civilta’ Cattolica offers an account of Pope Francis’s recent meeting with 120 superiors general of men’s religious orders in late November.CNS has highlights:
While you can access the full 17-page article in English, Spanish or Italian at the journal’s website, here is a sampling of some of the favorite excerpts (CNS translations of the original Italian).
--Today’s religious men and women need to be prophetic, “capable of waking up the world,” of showing they are a special breed who “have something to say” to the world today.
--“The church must be attractive. Wake up the world! Be witnesses of a different way of doing things, acting, living! (Show) it’s possible to live differently in this world. They need to live and behave in a truly different way, recognizing one’s weakness and sins, but acting with “generosity, detachment, sacrifice, forgetting oneself in order to take care of others.”
--“It’s necessary to spend time in real contact with the poor. For me this is really important: it’s necessary to know reality from experience, to dedicate time going to the periphery to truly know the situation and the life of the people.”
--Without firsthand experience with people’s lives, “then one runs the risk of being abstract ideologues or fundamentalists and this is not healthy.”
