SISTER INÊS PAULO ALBINO TO CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS OF THE I CONGRESS ON CHILDREN IN MALAWI: “YOU ARE ALREADY MISSIONARIES, YOUR PRAYER ILLUMINATES THE WORLD

“Dear children and teenagers, you are already missionaries, you are small, but you have a heart as big as the sky, you are the light that illuminates the whole world with the prayer you do every day, with the help you give to others”. So Sister Inês Paulo Albino ASC, Secretary General of the Pontifical Work of the Holy Childhood (POSI), addressed the children and adolescents who took part in recent days in the I Congress on Childhood in Malawi. An atmosphere of great celebration welcomed the intervention of Sister Inês, who on Saturday 2 August first of all thanked the organizers of the initiative, in particular Father Peter Madeya, Director of the Pontifical Missionary Works (POM) of Malawi, for the great commitment made not only for the event but in general to make known the POM and in particular the Opera della Santa Infanzia.

“You are above all “bridges” between families, in society and in the world – underlined the Secretary General of POSI addressing children and adolescents with whom he had a dense dialogue during the meeting. “You do it” added Sister Inês “with simple gestures that transform people’s hearts and that help to live the Gospel in a concrete way”. During the meeting with the children, which took place in the afternoon, as well as in the morning in the one shared with diocesan Directors, collaborators and animators of the POSI, the Secretary General, who the day before visited the dioceses of Dezda and Mangochi going to visit some projects supported by the POM, including a church under construction and a hospital structure, recalled that today the Work of the Holy Childhood has millions of “little missionaries” distributed in the parishes, schools and movements of the five Continents. Sister Inês therefore mentioned long-term goals including education to a missionary sensitivity and the promotion of missionary vocations and then invited the participants to try their hand at concrete actions. “I would like to challenge you,” he said, “with two actions to achieve our goals as small missionaries.

Devote yourselves to small daily commitments to live well in the family and in the missionary ecclesial communion and be generous in missionary cooperation towards the most needy children and towards the missions of the whole world”. He also reiterated to the diocesan directors and collaborators the importance of starting from the essentials by focusing on small concrete steps, taking the opportunity also to reiterate some technical and bureaucratic rules related to the request for subsidies. “I invite everyone to be brave and creative in the task of rethinking the objectives, structures, style and methods of evangelization of their communities and Dioceses – said the secretary general of POSI -. A good opportunity to move from theory to practice is January 6, the Missionary Children’s Day, celebrated in local Churches even on different dates depending on different needs. Well, on this occasion you are called to find a way to encourage every child to be a missionary in their family, in their school, in their community and in the Universal Church through the awareness of all to support missionaries and projects to be carried out in many missions in the world”.