Greetings from Br Massimo Fusarelli on the feast of St. Francis 2024

Dear brothers and sisters may the Lord grant you peace!
I cordially wish you all a happy feast of St. Francis, which has a special meaning this year because of the centenary of the Stigmata. We have just celebrated this memory, which is still alive. It still concerns and touches us today.
When we look at the life of Francis, we find a mixture of pain and love, joy and passion, which we call perfect joy.
From his youth, Francis lived the discovery and response to the love of Christ in the concrete reality of his life. He was not afraid of what is human, challenging, costly. He welcomed it to the point of being marked by it in his flesh.
He did not run away from the wounds of the lepers, but embraced those of the poor priests and his own brothers. How many little ones and poor people did Francis embrace! How many people wounded by sickness, loneliness, sin and injustice.
In this contact with the wounds of others, he also knew and accepted his own, even those of his difficult relationship with his fraternity and with some of his brothers. He experienced a great temptation before La Verna and went through that dark night.
The stigmata are not only the Lord's response to Francis' wounds, but also a completely new gift of love and union with Christ, which shed new light on his entire previous life and prepared him to sing to the creatures in the Canticle and to embrace his sister death.
On this feast of St. Francis, the unbearable sounds of war continue to reach us from the Middle East, from Ukraine, from eastern Congo, from the suffering of Sudan and Haiti, and from so many other countries. We hear the cry of so many wounded by life in our cities, I think of the young victims of drug, alcohol and digital addiction; we hear the cry of loneliness of the elderly and the sick, as well as the victims of drug trafficking in so many countries.
Let us also listen to the groaning of the creation, our common home, so endangered by our overpowering of creatures in the name of limitless profit.
What a burden of injustice that seems to extinguish hope for a future of peace, justice and harmony with creation.
The stigmata of Francis remind us that we are in the journey towards the kingdom of God. Only then will we receive the fullness of life and joy. The cry of love and pain of the stigmata gives us the compass for this journey, reminds us that suffering does not have the last word, and invites us not to be afraid to touch and share the wounds of so many.
From wounds, new life is possible! Happy Feast of St. Francis to each and every one of you!