I wish to speak with you about four or five things which need highlighting.  I believe and am sure these are already present in your thoughts – but please be so kind as to permit me to say them here because they come from things I’ve seen as in my travels around the world and I believe they will be useful for your reflection.  They are very simple.  (We will take our break and our photo afterwards.)

First of all, I wish to compliment you on your being the World Council of the Association of Salesian Cooperators.  I congratulate you because – for those of us who know what it means to animate a world-wide institute – it takes great commitment, hard work, and much availability in the terms of energy used to do so.

The first point I wish to make is that your Council, in my opinion, offers you an excellent opportunity to be able to understand reality on the world level and the realities of the world so that you can animate, help, and govern the Association of Salesian Cooperators well.  In doing so, I wish to underline those 4 or 5 things which I believe we cannot, ought not, forget.

1. Permit me to make reference to your Project of Apostolic Life. In the presentation by your World Coordinator, Noemi speaks of how the Project is the “book of life” for the Salesian Cooperator, how the Statutes and the Project are your charismatic ID card.  My suggestion is this and I hope that it will be clear to you: two years is an insufficient amount of time to make known and understood, to deepen and to appreciate this reality of being Salesian Cooperators because it is a very varied, broad one.  For this reason, I propose to you the following: that you work must be to remember to continue to animate and value the Project of Apostolic Life within this historical moment, including what regards the Regulations which are a bit outdated (for we all know that animation on the world level moves forward slowly, a little at a time).  I experience this even with the Salesian Congregation.  Many times I think that the animation of our Congregation, of your Association, demands that we carry forward one that I will call “circular,” meaning that we should focus on those things which we deem the most important but to do so in such a way as to carry forward processes which lagged behind in the past years (see your Regulations).

2. The second thing I wish to share regards formation. This is the central point, in my opinion.  It should comprise one-third of your agenda when you meet as a Council.  My thought is simply this: first formation, then animation.  I say this because I believe that the life of the Association, of the Institute, in this moment needs to take up this binomial again. When we speak of formation, we are not speaking of reading a book; instead, we are speaking of assuring that we are drawing ever closer to our identity.  And it is most important for any SDB Confrere or FMA Sister, as well as for the Salesian Cooperator.  We must deepen our knowledge and our living out of our own charismatic identity.  Therefore, I invite you to unite a formation process to your living out your Project of Apostolic Life which will guarantee growth in one’s spiritual identity.  A related point of great importance regarding an Association of world scope – just as it is for our Congregations (I speak of these Congregations because we wish to help them see that your extension on the world level is a reality very close to their own) – is animation.  The richness – so as to understand it well – of your and of our Association demands true labor in the area of animation.  Thinking that the Regions will move ahead by themselves and that this is sufficient is wrong.  I ask you to deepen, truly deepen, the topic of formation and that this be a discussion point of great significance and depth during your World Council meetings.  Again I repeat that in order to guarantee one’s growth in his or her charismatic identity, and also in the growth of the Association’s as a whole, Formation is the means for a truly efficacious animation of the Regions from which you come.

3. I heard you say that some Centers are poor and others old. May I offer you a criterion which might help you begin your reflection on these realities?  What you have shared is nothing new to us SDB – we lament the same in our Congregation, in our Council meetings.  Do not forget that the Association is a living body and is always in flux.  This means that at one time some Centers were beautiful and good and assisted the SDB and the FMA, but today?  You ought not be afraid when you realize that at times life invites us to accept poverty and even death contemporaneously with birth and beginnings – go forward.  When saying this, I mean to underline greatly vocational animation within your Association.  When possible, it ought to be done with the help of the FMA Institute and the SDB Congregation.  I spoke to this in a message of July 17 to the Cooperators of Spain and of Portugal and remind you of it here because I wish to remind everyone always that: “Whenever it is possible to do so with our help in places where we are together, we must build your wonderful, lay, Salesian Vocation which is of so great a reality in the Church!”  At the same time, this demands great serenity in helping this most beautiful vocational reality mature ever more.

4. Penultimate point: I invite each of you to think about how the Association can be helped in those Regions where its presence is poor. For example, according to me Africa holds an incredible potential!  At times we have not succeeded, our charismatic activities notwithstanding, in demonstrating, in giving life to this lay Vocation in a just manner in those lands.  In this case, at times, we must support you above all at the start.  I am thinking of those nations that I visited in Africa where, even after twenty years of our presence, there are no Salesian Cooperators – and this is not because we have not succeeded in demonstrating the beauty and the importance of the lay person.  It is the Association itself that must show us how we are to go about this.  When visiting Asian and Oceania, I found this: there is a huge job there for the Regional SDB Councilor, as you (Philip) have stated so many times.  But at the same time, it is a concern that very often the Salesian Cooperators are still today completely unknown in their reality.  Why do I share this with you?  For the purpose of reminding you that the reality of the Association is not the same in the entire world nor can it be, at least for now!  The journey of our aging Europe can only envy the youth and possibilities in Asia, Oceania, and Africa.  We need to see how to “implant” what, already in years gone by, was implanted on our old continent.

5. Finally – and then we’ll go for our espresso – I exhort you, because this is a high-level group – to invite all your, and our, Association to be and to grow in a Family atmosphere, the Salesian one. I permit myself to tell you this precisely because it is my duty.  I feel that I am the number one ambassador to all our Groups of the Salesian Family.  I am so very happy to meet every now and then with 12 or 15 Groups of our Salesian Family – where the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the Salesians of Don Bosco, and the Salesian Cooperators ought always be present for we are the spiritual descendants of Don Bosco.  I exhort you to be the first in creating that profound sense of Salesian Family wherever you go, not only within your own Association of Salesian Cooperators!