Below is a ZENIT translation of Pope Francis’ address to the Nomadelfia Community on Saturday in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
The Nomadelfia Community – consisting of around 330 people, including many children – founded by the Italian priest Zeno Saltini (1900-1981), proposes a model of life inspired by the first Christians. It is based in the province of Grosseto.
After hearing testimonies from some of its members and being invited to visit the Nomadelfia Community, which receives around 10,000 people every year, the Holy Father addressed those present.
* * *
Dear Brothers and Sisters, good morning!
I am delighted to be able to live this meeting with you and to be able to get to know better your experience of community life. I am struck by your testimonies and thank you for what you have said.
The Season of Advent helps us to meditate on the Son of God who came in the flesh, who with His birth brought light and peace to the world. At Christmas, God does not reveal Himself as He who is on high and dominates the universe, but as He who abases Himself and descends, assuming the frail aspect of a child. Thus, God teaches us that we must not put ourselves above others, but that we are called to abase ourselves, to serve the weakest out of love, to make ourselves little with the little. If, through the coming of His Son on earth, God involved Himself with man to the point of making Himself one of us, except for sin, it follows that, in keeping with the word of Jesus Himself, anything that we have done to one of the littlest ones we have done to Him (cf. Matthew 25:40ff).
Don Zeno Saltini, your founder, understood these things well and, despite difficulties and misunderstandings, he went forward confidently, with the objective of taking the good seed of the Gospel also to the most arid territories. And he succeeded! Your Nomadelfia Community is proof of this. Don Zeno presents himself to us today as the example of a faithful disciple of Christ that, in imitation of the divine Master, bends down over the sufferings of the weakest and the poorest, becoming a witness of inexhaustible charity. May his courage and his perseverance be a guide to you in your daily commitment to have the seeds of goodness fructify, which he sowed abundantly, animated by evangelical passion and sincere love of the Church. Whoever fed, dressed, received one of the poorest among men, will have fed, received, loved the Son of God Himself. Whoever, on the contrary, rejected, repulsed, forgot one of the littlest and weakest, will have neglected God Himself. As Saint John says: “for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (cf. 1 John 4:20).
Dear brothers and sisters, your spiritual patrimony is connected in a special way to a life of fraternity, characterized in particular by the reception of children and an altogether special care of the elderly. I encourage you to give to society this example of solicitude and tenderness, which is so important. Children and the elderly build the future of peoples: the children, because they will carry history forward; the elderly, because they transmit the experience and wisdom of their life. Do not tire of cultivating and nourishing this dialogue between the generations, making the faith your polar star and the Word of God your principal lesson to assimilate and live in the concreteness of daily life. Thus you will be capable of imitating increasingly God’s closeness to men and to contemplate in the face of the most frail persons the image of the Child Jesus.
I wish you all I good journey towards Christmas, to be able to celebrate it with joy and peace of heart. May the Lord bless you and the Virgin Mary protect you. And I ask you, please, to pray for me.
[Original text: Italian] [Translation by ZENIT]
