Advent Letter--Openness of Mind and Heart
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15 October 1986
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be ever with us!

It is now a little over a month since the Pope, along with the leaders of the world religions, gathered in Assisi to pray for peace. It was an event of historic significance, for it was the first time in human history that so many religious traditions came together to pray about a concern that was close to all their hearts. For us of the Christian and Catholic tradition it was a visible expression of one of the messages which the Spirit gave to the Church during the Second Vatican Council. It was then that the Spirit of God invited the Church to open its arms in a more expansive way to the whole of humanity. No other Ecumenical Council in the history of the Church has addressed such explicit messages of respect and comprehension to the other world religions as did the Second Vatican Council.

The gathering of the heads of the world religions around the person of the Pope took place significantly in the town of Assisi. It became a sort of "open city" for the occasion. The differing and sometimes conflicting religious traditions could agree to declare Assisi an "open city," because of the respect the world has for St. Francis whose name evokes peace, humility, joy, detachment of heart. It was an appropriate setting to express the Catholic Church's new openness to the world.

How open is our Congregation to the world? Our particular and specific mission within the Church is to announce to the poor the good news of Christ's coming. It is towards the poor that we must direct the thrust of our love and zeal. We must, however, do that in such a way that we do not give people of other creeds or of other social classes an impression that we have no time for them. Read the correspondence of St. Vincent. His face is set towards the poor: his energies directed towards them. Yet on his way to the poor all passersby are respectfully greeted in the Lord and are humbly and graciously invited to join him on his pilgrimage to the City of the Poor. What an assortment of people accepted his invitation! The nobility, the clergy, the bourgeois, the poor themselves fell in behind St. Vincent on his pilgrimage to find Christ, not in Bethlehem, but in the suffering minds and bodies of the poor of his time. Would St. Vincent have magnetized such a variety of men and women if his mind and heart had not been an open city?

It is lack of openness of heart and openness of mind that gives so much pathos to the narratives recounting the birth of Our Lord. The innkeepers, Herod, the religious authorities in Jerusalem all suffer in one way or another from having closed minds and closed hearts. "He came to His own home and his own people received Him not." (Jn 1: 11). By contrast the Shepherds, the Magi, St. Joseph and Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus, shine forth in the narratives as open characters, who received the word of God into "a good and perfect heart." (Lk 8:15).

For us, as for St. Francis of Assisi and St. Vincent, such openness of heart and openness of mind will be the fruit of humble, silent contemplation of the Word Incarnate in the Christmas Crib. If we are to walk with St. Vincent on his pilgrimage to the City of the Poor, we must check that the word 'Poor' is not just a slogan word for us. To preach the gospel to the poor with the authentic accent of Jesus Christ, we must first have preached the poor Christ to ourselves. We can be at ease with the poor and be effective communicators to them, only if we have learned from Our Lord in prayer something about his own experience of being poor, that is, being detached in mind, in heart and in will, not only from material things, but from all that impedes us from a humble and loving accomplishment of God's will in our lives.

So allow me to suggest this Advent that you:

- Open your mind, by making room for those whom you tend to ignore or pass by because they are members of another social class or hold a different creed. Is there some one person, man or woman, rich or poor, whom you might persuade to join St. Vincent's pilgrimage to the open city of the poor?

- Open your heart, by some gesture of generosity to a poor person or family who until now have been outside the circle of those you help. Have you some one in mind who before Christmas will feel less hungry, less alone, less unloved because of some gesture on your part?

I hope your Christmas will be a joyful one, and that wish is shared by all of us who live here in the Curia. What St. Vincent wrote in a letter a few days before Christmas in 1656 is apropos: "Here we have nothing new except the mystery (of Christmas) which is drawing near and which will make us see the Saviour of the world reduced almost to nothing under the form of an infant. I hope that we will be gathered together at the foot of His Crib to ask Him to draw us after Him in His abasement. It is with this desire and in His love that..." (Coste VI, Fr. ed., p. 150). I remain, your devoted confrere.

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