Homily | 17 September 2025

Homily 17 September – General Chapter

We just listened to the commentary placed on the lips of Jesus, which is an authentic challenge that perhaps we could make our own: “Wow, no one can understand you guys, what’s going on with you? John comes with his fasting and you criticize him, I come and you tell me I’m a glutton”.

No one understands you; you are, one might say, out of sorts, always unhappy. You don't know how to behave.

Might the Lord be able to say this of the Order of St. Augustine? Can this be said of us as a General Chapter, now in this particular Eucharist, the last one we celebrate before the solemn one tomorrow when our new Prior General will preside?

Why do you not recognize the things that are happening around you?

Asking ourselves these questions, I believe, is a serious invitation to analysis, a discernment, which we could welcome as a proposal full of hope in the context of this Jubilee, in this pilgrimage of hope that is our life, and that is also the life of the Order.

An analysis, a hopeful discernment that could be enlightened today by the word of God that we have heard and the memories of the saints which the Church puts before us.
The letter to Timothy invites us to recognize as truth that the Church is the house of God, which has Truth as its pillar and foundation. She invites us to place ourselves unconditionally at her service. And more, with the psalm we have sung we recall that great are the works of the Lord, and despite our weakness we are personally and as an institution the work of His hands.

What's more, we are tired of remembering and acknowledging that we were born from the Church, represented by the Pope, and to place ourselves at its service. We represent the world, we come from five continents, but who sees us or considers us, who is charged because they recognize us in the service of this house of God? Or, as this Oikos, which is the Church, our world? We serve with compassion, creativity and passion in this our world. Do we sigh and do our hearts beat with Him? Are his joys and hopes ours, his sadness and misfortunes also those of the Order? I humbly believe that a similar passion should place us at the service of the most poor and needy of our world. Poverty and need read in all its contexts.

Of meaning and knowledge, of happiness, but also economic poverty that always encloses the other poverties. To put ourselves at the unconditional service of the Church which today cries out to bring about Universal Human Fraternity, the very essence of the Lord and his Kingdom. And that even now resounds in the concert which with that purpose was celebrated Saturday within the open arms which is the piazza of St. Peter.

Yet, together with the Word we are also enlightened today by the feast of the saints we remember, Saint Hildegard and St. Robert Bellarmine. The saints, as we heard in the recent canonization of Frassati and Acutis, are living examples that impel us to follow, to be faithful, to strive for the ideal that is holiness.