Conference of the Franciscan Family
Rome, April 11, 2010

Your Holiness,

May the Lord give you peace!

With this greeting revealed to Saint Francis by the Most High, we the Ministers of the great Franciscan Family, we pray that the Risen Lord will give you His peace in this most difficult moment for the Church and for you, to whom the Risen Lord has entrusted the task of “confirming the brothers in faith”.

Your Holiness, with this Paschal greeting, we express our sympathy, our communion and solidarity in the face of the attacks coming from the ‘media’ of different countries, intending to dishonour Your Person because of the crime of paedophilia committed by some members of the Church. Yes, those are atrocious crimes, but this way of generalizing is not just, because the result is to affect the extraordinarily greater majority of priests-religious, who live to obey the fundamental commandment to “announce the Good News and work exclusively for the good of the People of God.

By expressing our solidarity, we also desire, Your Holiness, to manifest to you publicly our gratitude for the discretion, the clarity, the firmness and the compassion shown toward the victims of these abuses, in facing the several painful situations that have taken place in different parts of the world and which risk to cover so much good that the ecclesial community does. Your attitude gives us comfort and encourages us to respond courageously and, at the same time, in a merciful way, to similar cases within our Family.

Thank you, Your Holiness, for the witness of faith, of serenity, of profound and silent suffering with which you face the storm which is strongly hitting Peter’s “boat”.

Hoping that the assurance of our constant and affectionate prayer to the merciful Father, will be of comfort to Your Holiness, in order “that the days of the Passion” may soon be over and that the light of the Resurrection may shine more brightly “in the midst of sadness and the negative aspects” of the journey of the Church at present, with the certainty of the promise of the Risen Lord: “I am with you always, up to the end of the world”.

Most devotedly your sons in Christ and in Saint Francis

Br. José Rodríguez Carballo
Minister General OFM

Br. Marco Tasca
Minister General OFMConv.

Br. Mauro Jöhri
Minister General OFMCap.

Br. Michael Higgins
Minister General TOR

Encarnación del Pozo
Minister General OFS

Br. James Puglisi
Minister Generalle Atonement