9 August 1983
Sao Paulo, Brazil

My dear Sisters and Confreres,

The Gospel passage which the Church sets before us today is in part about numbers. There are a number of disciples surrounding Jesus and for a moment He takes his eyes off them and looks at one small little child, addresses an invitation to the child to come close to Him, and then invites all His disciples to look at this child. "I assure you," Jesus says, "unless you change and become like little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of heaven." Today at the end of the Gospel passage, Jesus talks about the man who had a hundred sheep and loses one. He leaves the ninety-nine and goes off to find the one sheep that was lost.

As I speak to you, I am conscious that I do so in the most populous city of your country, and one of the largest cities of the world. I imagine that at times you must feel that it is not a question of leaving ninety-nine sheep and looking for one that is lost, but rather of leaving one sheep and searching for the ninety-nine that are lost. You live daily with the problem, or rather the challenge, "How can we reach the millions of this city with the good news which in the Name of Christ the Church wants to bring to them?"

To me it is always a clear manifestation of God's grace that in the face of so many millions who are not in direct contact with the Church, priests and religious and lay leaders do not lose confidence in the task of trying to reach the crowds with the message of Christ. So often the visible results of your dedication to God's people and especially to His poor are very meager and unspectacular.

There is much encouragement for us in the final phrase of today's Gospel: "It is no part of your heavenly Father's plan that a single one of these little ones should ever come to grief." (Mt 18:14). We make our plans: our pastoral plans, our Provincial plans, our Community plans with a view to reaching the ninety-nine. We do well. Let us not forget, however, the allusion which Our Lord makes today to `the plan' of His heavenly Father. That is the plan which matters most, and all our pastoral plans must take account of that great plan which in this life remains for us in large measure hidden from our eyes. "Who has known the mind of God?...O the depths of the Wisdom of God." (Rom 11:33).

It should be a source of confidence to us that God has His own plans for reaching the ninety-nine, that everything does not depend on us. Certainly He seeks and counts on our cooperation in reaching the ninety-nine. The truth is that God's grace, God's love, God's Wisdom is not exhausted, when I myself reach the point of exhaustion, frustration and failure in what I try to do for Him in the salvation of souls, in the search for the ninety-nine.