The document is a letter from a Councilor for Missions to her sisters highlighting Pope Francis' message for Lent and focusing on young migrants and unaccompanied minors. She invites her sisters to change their gaze towards migrants by removing prejudices and living attitudes of going out, meeting, and being close to migrants within their communities. She emphasizes that migrants need love, friendship, and human closeness above all and calls her sisters to be sisters of migrants as they are their brothers and sisters.

1. Goout,Meet,Beclose!
Rome, 14 February 2018
Dearest Sisters,
I am pleased to reach you on this new 14, above all because today, Ash Wednesday, in communion
with the whole Church, we begin the Time of Lent. It is a time that gives us the opportunity to look
at life, events, and people with hope and trust. Time that makes us live the dynamics of [missionary]
conversion and prepares us to relive the great mysteries of the life of Jesus who, abandoned to the
Father's will, walks resolutely towards Jerusalem!
In January, we focused on the message of Pope Francis for the 104th
World Day of Migrants and
Refugees: “Accept, protect, promote, and integrate migrants and refugees”. Furthermore, we
committed ourselves to learning about migratory experiences within our communities and devoting
a concrete, physical space to the project “For a common home in the diversity of peoples”. Surely
these two commitments have helped us to make room in and around us to accommodate diversity,
the different, the foreigner.
On this Ash Wednesday, I would like to highlight what Pope Francis says in his Lenten message,
considering our horizon: young migrants, unaccompanied minors!
Pope Francis proposes in his message to us a reflection on charity: “Because of the spread of
iniquity, the love of many will grow cold” (Mt 24:12). Quoting Dante Alighieri and his description
of hell, the Pope asks some questions: “How does charity grow cold in us? What are the signs that
indicate that love risks being extinguished in us?”. Pope Francis says that “even creation is a silent
witness to this cooling of charity: the earth is poisoned by waste thrown out through carelessness
and interests; the seas, also polluted, must unfortunately cover the remains of many drownings
from forced migration; the heavens - which in the design of God sing His glory - are furrowed by
machines that make instruments of death rain down.”
We all know that these “instruments of death” are one of the causes of today's migratory
phenomenon that set thousands of people in motion, which forced them to flee violence, war, and
all its consequences; to leave home, land, country, culture ... that is, their history! Those are the
“instruments of death” that destroy peace and harmony among peoples because love has
unfortunately cooled down ... because human beings have lost their humanity!
Dear sisters, I invite you to read and meditate on the message of Pope Francis for Lent, making a
practical exercise: that of changing your gaze toward migrants. Change the gaze inside and
out of the community! Lent 2018 is for all of us an invitation to remove from our eyes every
prejudice, every attitude of condemnation, rejection or indifference.
To make real the desire to change our gaze, we try to identify within our works or presences, people
who have lived the migratory experience. Maybe we are in contact with people who have
experienced or still live the drama of losing their roots, of distance from their land ... and we do not
realize it!

2. Goout,Meet,Beclose!
The project “For a common home in the diversity of peoples” wants to help us live conversion in
depth: in interpersonal relationships, in ordinary daily life, in the encounter with those who are
different, with those who are unknown, inside and outside the community, looking beyond the
window of our house, and committing ourselves in the first person to live three attitudes: GO OUT,
MEET, BE CLOSE!
So that love does not grow cold in our communities and towards migrants, especially young people
and unaccompanied minors, I use the voice of Pope Francis once again:
“New faces of men, women, and children, marked by so many forms of poverty and violence, are
again before our eyes and wait to find along their way, outstretched hands and welcoming hearts
[...]. Migrants certainly need good laws, development programs, organization, but they also need,
first of all, love, friendship, human closeness; they need to be heard, looked in the eyes,
accompanied; they need God, met in the gratuitous love of a woman who, with a consecrated
heart, is sister and mother. May the Lord always renew in you the attentive and merciful gaze
towards the poor who live in our cities and in our countries”. (Vatican, 9 December 2017. Audience for the
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the occasion of the first centenary of the death of Saint Frances Cabrini).
I thank you, sisters, for your heart warmed and inhabited by Love; may each one, in the encounter
with Jesus, Bread and Word, recognize herself as a daughter of God and sister of those who have
left their land, abandoned their cultural roots, to face a journey without certainties; a sister to those
who had to cross the desert, the sea, borders, walls ... in search of a more dignified, more human
life.
We are, and we really want to be, sisters of the migrants because the migrants are our brothers
and sisters!
May the Lord help us to fight every form of iniquity so that love will not grow cold in us and
around us! “He always gives us new opportunities so that we can start loving again”.
Many greetings and let us remain in communion of prayer, embracing together all of wounded
humanity, especially our migrant brothers and sisters.
Councilor for the Missions