13 June 1991
Rome, Italy

My dear Sisters,

If you were able to visit all the parish churches in the world and see the statues that the faithful have placed in them, you might very well find that the statue which is most commonly found, after that of the Mother of God and St. Joseph, would be that of the saint whose feast we are celebrating today, St. Anthony of Padua or, if you prefer, St. Anthony of Lisbon.

We think of St. Anthony as the Saint who has a special interest in those who have lost objects and cannot find them. He is a very popular Saint and, although he is dead more than seven hundred fifty years, people talk to him in their prayers as if he had only died yesterday. He is the Saint who in heaven still seems to have the charism of finding things that have been lost.

Something that has been lost: those words were on the lips of Our Lord often enough. He said that He had come to save those who were lost. Jesus Christ loved to tell stories about finding things that had been lost. You will recall the parable of the woman who had ten coins and lost one. When Jesus told that story, was He thinking of His Mother Mary in Nazareth? Perhaps on some occasion He saw her seeking for a coin that had been lost. It is not always a sin, thank God, to lose or mislay things, and so Mary, like the rest of us, probably had that experience. You will recall, too, the parable of the man who had a hundred sheep and lost one; also the parable of the man who had two sons and lost one. Jesus Christ seems to have thought a lot about seeking and finding what was lost.

All our lives we are seeking something we have lost. Our hearts, whether we fully recognize it or not, are seeking the God Who made us and that paradise which Adam and Eve lost. We are, as we so often say in the Salve Regina, "exsules Hevae," "poor banished children of Eve." The experience of this Assembly is a seeking for something which in a sense we feel we have lost. Is there anyone here who would not like to have had the experience of being members of one of those communities which St. Vincent and St. Louise in their lifetime guided? We feel, perhaps, that we have lost the freshness and the simplicity and the openness of those first communities with whom our Founders conversed. Our search to find what we feel we may have lost, is made more difficult by the complexity and number of cultures in which today the Company now finds itself implanted.

The Church in our day has become more sensitive in its appreciation of the values it finds in the different cultures of our world. That must be considered a gain for our generation. It must, however, be recognized that the values of any particular culture are not supreme. Not all the values of a culture are Gospel values. Cultures are in need of evangelization. In his recent encyclical on the missions, Pope John Paul II has remarked that "since culture is a human creation and is therefore marked by sin, it, too, needs to be healed, enobled and perfected." (Redemptoris Missio, p54). It was Paul VI who stated in his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, "the rift between the Gospel and culture is undoubtedly an unhappy circumstance of our times, just as it has been in other eras." (p20).

To the person of faith the sociological values of a culture will always be subordinate to theological ones. Because sociological values are more apparent, there is always the risk that the theological values will be overlooked. St. Paul found a lost theological value when he discovered that his preaching of a powerless and crucified Christ was a barrier to belief for the Jews and sheer nonsense for the Gentiles, but ultimately a revelation to the people of his time of the power and the wisdom of God. (cf. 1 Cor 1:23-25). Perhaps it is that we, who live in an age that has lost to a degree a sense of the transcendence of God, must come to a fresh discovery of that truth and of that wisdom which comes from a loving contemplation of the poor, obedient and humble Christ on the Cross. Perhaps we stand in need of a revision course in what St. Paul calls "the language of the Cross." (1 Cor 1:18).

You may be saying to yourselves that I have lost St. Anthony. So let me end by telling you of a woman who once said to me that St. Anthony was fond of money. I asked her to explain what she meant. She told me that, when you pray to help you find something that you have lost, you must also promise him that you will give some money to the poor; otherwise he will do nothing for you. I don't believe that the saints in heaven can be bribed in such a crude way. But I do believe that there is no one in heaven who is not interested in seeing the poor helped. It cannot be otherwise, since everyone in heaven has passed the test set forth by Our Lord in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel.