GREETING OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS TO MEMBERS OF THE GALILEO FOUNDATION

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Dear Friends,
I extend cordial greetings to you, the trustees and benefactors of the Galileo
Foundation, and willingly take this opportunity to convey my appreciation for your
generous commitment to the Church’s pastoral mission. Your sponsorship of a wide
variety of projects expresses something of the very universality of the Church herself.
As lay people, with unique ways of following the Lord in your own specific vocations
and responsibilities, you have an essential part to play in making known the saving
message of the Gospel to the people of our time, and especially to the most
vulnerable of our brothers and sisters. I encourage you to keep on generously offering
such important witness.
I would like principally to emphasize your contribution to raising awareness of the
plight of those who suffer from poverty and exploitation, especially those entrapped
by the deadly crime of human trafficking. This is an urgent and essential duty for
today’s Christians. As such, it is surely no coincidence that we meet on the feast day
of Saint Josephine Bakhita, the patron of victims of human trafficking. She knew from
painful experience the reality of slavery and its humiliating and violent consequences.
Yet, by God’s grace, she also came to know true freedom and joy. Her holiness of life
is a summons not only to fight with greater determination against modern forms of
slavery which are an open wound on the body of society, a scourge upon the body of
Christ and a crime against humanity (cf. Address to the International Conference on
Combating Human Trafficking, 10 April 2014), but also to learn from her great
example. What does she say to us? She teaches us how to attend to the poor with
tenderness, gentleness and compassion.
Dear friends, in your ongoing projects and work, may you be sustained by an ever
deeper rootedness in prayer, by the intercession of Saint Josephine Bakhita and by
the strength that the Holy Spirit alone can give. And as you serve the Lord, I invoke
God’s blessings of joy and peace upon you and your families. I thank you for your
prayers and ask you please to continue to pray for me. Thank you.
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