Calling for the gathered prelates to be meek, faithful, close to their flocks and tender, and to pay attention to both the big and small events of life so people can “savour the presence of Jesus alive in our midst,” Pope Francis created 20 new cardinals Saturday, including 16 eligible to vote for the next pontiff.
“To us, who in the church have been chosen from among the people for a ministry of particular service, it is as if Jesus is handing us a lighted torch and telling us: ‘take this; as the Father has sent me so I now send you’,” Francis told the cardinals. “In this way, the Lord wants to bestow on us his own apostolic courage, his zeal for the salvation of every human being, without exception.”
Francis spoke to the prelates of the “fire” that Jesus “came to bring the earth, a fire that the Holy Spirit kindles in the hearts, hands and feet of all those who follow him.” God himself, Francis said, is a “powerful flame” that “purifies, regenerates, and transfigures all things.”
But there is also a slow-burning fire, the pope said, that of the “charcoal,” which makes God’s presence warm and nourishing for everyday life.
The “fire” that comes from “presence,” he said, was once experimented and shared by Saint Charles de Foucauld, a poor hermit Francis declared a saint earlier this year. He “lived for years in a non-Christian environment, in the solitude of the desert, staking everything on presence: the presence of the living Jesus, in the word and in the Eucharist, and his own presence, fraternal, amicable and charitable,” the Pope said.
Francis listed several examples of that charcoal fire that is present in the “small” things, such as the consecrated who live in the “quiet and enduring fire in their work-place, in interpersonal relationships, in small acts of fraternity. It is also in the unassuming ministry of a parish priest, in the Christian married couples and their “homemade” prayers, and in the elderly, representing “the hearth of memory, both in the family and the life of the community.”
“How important is the fire of the elderly!” he said. “Around it families unite and learn to interpret the present in the light of past experiences and to make wise decisions.”