Beloved and Hopeful – 8th May 2025 – Message from the Superior General

One of the final gifts Pope Francis gave to the Church was the Jubilee Year, with its motto “Pilgrims of Hope.” Indeed, persevering in hope — in today’s world and Church — is no small feat. Closer to home, GC2024 has noted that “our numbers have not increased since 2018; on the contrary, the number of elderly members is growing” (no. 20). How can we continue to hope in the face of such a dim pictures?

Let me share with you an insight I received this Easter season. The Gospel we proclaim on Easter Sunday is the discovery of the Empty Tomb, as recounted in the Gospel of John. There we read that the Beloved Disciple, who ran to the tomb with Peter, “went in, … saw and believed” (Jn 20:8). It strikes me how little evidence was needed for the Beloved Disciple to believe — no appearance of the Risen Lord, just the sight of “the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.” That was enough for him.

This made me realize that the more one has experienced God’s love, the less evidence one needs to believe. To me, this also explains why no apparition of the Risen Lord is mentioned in relation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, not even in the list Paul composed in 1 Corinthians 15. She, whose experience of God’s love was greater even than that of the Beloved Disciple, needed no proof. She was certain that her Son would rise from the dead.

It thus becomes imperative for each of us to not shy away from God’s love, but rather to remain constantly open to it. As the comparison goes, there might be warm and gentle sunlight outside, but I can still choose to stay inside, in the dark and cold. If I am struggling to keep my hope alive, it might indicate that I am not “sunbathing” enough in God’s love — which, for me, is the very definition of contemplative prayer.

But it is not only through prayer that God’s love seeks to reach us. We believe in an incarnate God, meaning that God constantly tries to reach us through each other. It is in our respective communities — whether family, lay or religious community— that God’s love aspires to take flesh. This places a great responsibility on each one of us: we are all called to be channels of God’s love to our brothers and sisters.

This makes the spiritual testament of our Founder even more relevant to our missionary endeavour, wherein he exhorts the members “to engage to the full their holy eagerness in maintaining among themselves mutual love in Christ, being convinced that nothing may procure more the glory of God, one’s spiritual good and that of the neighbour than the conservation of the same, according to the words of our father, St. Paul, ‘But love builds up’” (as quoted in GC2024, no. 21). When we strive to love each other as brothers and sisters, we not only become living witnesses of the Gospel, but we also strengthen each other in hope.

To me, our Founder is a striking example of a Beloved Disciple who kept hope alive with so little evidence. We could list many circumstances and situations that might have crushed his hope in establishing our little Society, yet he kept “hoping against hope” (Rom 4:18), because he was rooted in  a profound experience of God’s love. He expresses this beautifully in his discernment exercise that led him to pursue the priesthood — an event we commemorate on the 8th of May — where he wrote: “The desire to give myself totally to God; he who suffered so much for my sins.” In his biography of the Founder, Fr. Tony Sciberras identifies this as one of the three key phrases that guided De Piro throughout his life (p. 71).

In the past weeks, as Pope Francis’ spiritual testament was revealed to the world, we were reminded again how dear the Blessed Virgin Mary was to him. We could say that just as our Founder gifted us with “community” in his testament, Pope Francis gifted us with the gift of  Mary — two realities which are deeply interconnected. In Scripture and theology, what is said of Mary can also be said of the Church, and therefore of the Christian community.

Thus, as we celebrate the graced moment when our Founder, during a Marian celebration, found light and strength to respond to God’s will, let us, like him, embrace our identity as Beloved Disciples, so that we too may proclaim with our lives that “hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5).