• Short introduction by Luisa Alfarano and Michele Tridente
IFCA Youth Coordination Responsibles (Video IT)

• Meditation by H. E. Msgr. Eduardo Garcia
bishop of San Justo, Eccl. Assistant of CA  Argentina and IFCA

I invite you once again to contemplate Mary’s love: a caring, dynamic and concrete love. A love full of boldness and focused completely on the gift of self. A Church permeated by these Marian qualities will always be a Church going forth, one that goes beyond her own limits and boundaries to let the grace she has received overflow…. (World Youth Day 2018, n. 4)

John invites us to prepare the way of the Lord. John echoes the voice of God; and God does not speak so that everything remains the same but so that everything changes, so that man and the world change. So that the man becomes, so that the world is transformed. God speaks so that man may turn his face to the Promise and be guided towards the reign of God that is coming and arrives.

Where God utters his Word, which is a promise, hope is born against all human hope, hope that does not disappoint. And hope is what moves us to make a way, fill the valleys, make low the mountains, straighten out what is crooked, overcome difficulties.

Advent is first and foremost the joyful announcement of the coming of Jesus. But John announces that this hope must be active. We must wait acting and watching. Last Sunday we were announced the gratuity of salvation, today the call is to collaborate. Because the experience of salvation does not occur only when God offers his grace, which is tenderness and faithfulness, but when this grace is realized in the life of man.

This grace is realized in the concrete circumstances of our history. It is the grace that becomes before all men a sign of the universal salvation of God, the principle of happiness.

Jesus is not only the one to whom we hope, but who was something of us. Through his precursor he asks us for a profound change of mentality, of heart: he asks us for the conversion. It is not about isolated acts, however costly, but to give way to the life that Jesus has, announces and lives. Conversion means to see life with the eyes of Christ, it’s an effort that demands of us to open the mind, to abandon preconceptions and to stay awake.

Conversion is not only to receive the friendship and affection of God but making it visible; it is to thank the gratuitous justification that God gives us and to strive for a more human justice; it is to reinvent each day the spirit and the hope, looking for the small signs of the step of God. Doing what we expect and sharing what we receive.

•  Let us pray the Holy Rosary, for the Pope Francis’ intentions