July – August - Franciscan Province – MALTA

we are again sent forth from
this sanctuary of sending
and mission to make
participants in this Good
News of all those whom we
meet on the road: to be
disciples and missionaries
so that all may have life in
Him.
Your Eminences,
Excellencies, Brothers: men
of the Gospel, encouraged
by the power which comes
to us from on high, let us
ask the Lord, through the
intercession of St. Mary of
the Angels and of Brother
Francis, for the grace to
open our hearts to the
Gospel so that we also may
be a living gospel. Peace
and Good in the Lord!
Fr.Francesco Bravi, OFM - Fr. Vincenzo Brocanelli, OFM
The Life and Mission of the
Order
The project of the universal
fraternity
I PART: THE LIFE OF THE
ORDER
To introduce you to
a knowledge of the life and
mission of the Order, we
would like to offer you,
together with some images
which we will show later on,
some simple reflections
which could help you to
know the process through
which the entire
international fraternity is
going.
To present the life of
the Order during this sixyear
period, I, on my part,
will refer to different texts
which we have drawn up
and are already putting into
practice, and which
accompany us in the course
of our study in depth and
our evaluation: Those born
of the 2003 General
Chapter (May the Lord give
you peace!- Priorities
2003/2009); the aid which
presented the project for
the VIII Anniversary of the
Foundation of the Order,
The Grace of our Origins;
and those of the recent
Extraordinary General
Chapter of September 2006
(The Instrumentum Laboris
of the Chapter and the
Final Document The Lord
speaks with us on the
Road). The process we
began is marked by a
powerful word, the refoundation
of the Order,
which the Minister General
entrusted to us and which
helped us to understand
better the process in its
profound contents.
The Final Document
of the 2003 General
Chapter, May the Lord give
you Peace!, addressed a
strong call to conversion to
each Friar, who were asked
“not to domesticate the
prophetic words of the
Gospel in order to adapt
them to a comfortable style
of life” (2); “to feel the
internal evangelical urgency
to be ‘born again’ (Jn 3, 3)
on both the personal and
institutional levels” (2); and
“to undertake, at all times
and in all places, the path
of gospel discernment: ‘Test
everything and hold on to
what is good’ (1Ts 5,
21)” (LgP 7).
“We recognise in this
context – the Final
Documents states - the
urgency of returning to the
essentials of our experience
of faith and of our
Franciscan spirituality in
order to nourish, from
within, our fragmented and
unequal world, which is
hungry for meaning, with
the liberating offer of the
Gospel, just as Francis and
Clare of Assisi did in their
time” (LgP 2).
To put these
indications into practice,
the Final Document
reminds us, “we expressed
our desire to continue in
the direction undertaken by
our Fraternity as it is
expressed in the Five
Priorities of the Order,
because we think that they
continue to be a key to
reading how to live our
identity and to understand
the expectations of the
world” (4). The Priorities
were, therefore, proposed
again and developed in the
L-A{BAR LULJU - AWISSU 2007 19
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