Rome, August 2022
Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Franciscan Family,
May the Lord give you peace!
We, the Committee of the Franciscan Family for the Franciscan Centenary, turn to you to continue the dialogue that our six General Minsters began last October 2nd. They announced the Centenary and followed up by issuing in the beginning of May a set of Guidelines entitled 2023-2026 A Centenary Articulated and Celebrated in Several Centenaries.
As you know, it is a text translated into ten languages, which presents an outline for the celebration of each of the stages of the Centenary: in 2023, The Rule and Christmas in Greccio; in 2024, the Stigmata; in 2025 The Canticle of Brother Sun, and in 2026 the Transitus or, maybe even better, the Passover of Francis. This text will be a fundamental support for the celebration of the Centenary.
Those of you who have already tried to read the Guidelines have certainly grasped the richness of what is being introduced. We are now sending you a very brief tool (just two pages) to better help you enter into the Guidelines and grasp the connection and articulation of the intended themes at a glance. It is a sort of table showing year by year the various themes linked to each Centenary, showing their makeup, articulated on four fundamental dimensions. It is a simple aid that aims to offer a possible way of utilizing the Guidelines to stimulate creativity.
In this way, we also want to invite you once again, if you have not already done so, to read the Guidelines, which you can find on the Order’s website OFM.ORG, in the “Documents” section (published on 2 May 2022).
We feel it is very important and meaningful that, belonging to the one Franciscan Family, we can all retrace together, in our different countries and cultures around the world, the essential stages of the last years of the life of “our” Francis of Assisi.
Those responsible for the four areas of Communication, Formation, Evangelisation and JPIC of the different Orders and Institutes of the Franciscan Family have also begun coordinating for the Centenary. Those responsible for Communication are already working on a single Centenary website for the entire Franciscan Family.
If at the end of these four years, we can say that we celebrated the centenaries together as a Franciscan Family, we would already have achieved a good result in terms of mutual acquaintance and, above all, communion.
May the Lord accompany us on this shared journey and allow us to experience the Centenary as an opportunity to decisively direct our gaze toward the future and to charismatically strengthen our Franciscan identity.
Fraternally,
The Franciscan Family Committee for the Franciscan Centenary.