From 1 to 6 June, the Minister General Br. Massimo Fusarelli, accompanied by the General Definitor Br. Cesare Vaiani, visited the Spanish Province of the Immaculate Conception. It was a fraternal visit under the motto “Following Christ poor, sent to proclaim the Gospel,” which crossed Spain from Madrid to Andalusia, from Extremadura to the Levante and on to Murcia, weaving together places of Franciscan memory and questions about the present.
The journey began in Madrid, at San Antonio del Retiro, with a meeting of the Secretariat for Missions and Evangelization and a time of prayer in the basilica of San Francisco el Grande. From there the visit reached the shrine of Nuestra Señora de Loreto, near Seville; then the hermitage of El Palancar and Guadalupe; next Santo Espíritu del Monte, in the Valencian Levante; and finally Cartagena, Santa Catalina del Monte and Murcia. Each stage joined shared prayer — Lauds, the Eucharist, the silence of the hermitages — to open conversation with the friars.
In the general gatherings with the brothers — at Loreto and at Santo Espíritu — and then in the conversation with the Provincial Definitory, a climate of calm candour took hold. The present and the future of the Franciscan presence were discussed openly, in a Spain living through a full “change of era”: a Church called to move “from quantity to significance,” yet also marked by a surprising awakening of committed young minorities — a faith chosen rather than inherited. The underlying question, drawn from the Ratio Evangelizationis Ite in mundum and from the Pentecost Letter “Beyond the Centenaries: the Spirit who gives life,” ran through every meeting: what kind of Friar Minor does the gift of the charism shape today? In the background, always, the Eighth Centenary of the Transitus of Saint Francis as a call to be reborn, not merely to remember — and the road being travelled together with the sister Provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, looked upon with realism and trust.
Two extended meetings with the Poor Clares, the Conceptionists and the other contemplatives — at Loreto and at Santo Espíritu — placed at the centre what is proper to the charism in our time: the contemplative dimension as the axis of Franciscan life, the anchor of a body on the move. They spoke of the real poverty of the monasteries, of welcoming the vocations of women whose paths are new, and of the intercultural formation that already runs through the communities, where sisters from other cultures bring an unexpected face of Christ. An interculturality that, it was said, is itself already a proclamation of the Kingdom.
The meetings with the OFS, with the students, the educators and those responsible for the Province’s fourteen schools and for the school in Cartagena, and with the young people setting out for the Pope’s visit to Spain, made tangible a mature laity, co-responsible for the mission alongside the friars. In education, in youth ministry, in social works, the shared responsibility of lay people appeared not as a stopgap but as a path of the Spirit: a new way in which the charism finds hands to keep it alive.
From this interweaving of faces and places emerged the sense that gave the visit its unity: the charism is greater than we are, and for that very reason it lives with us and beyond us. The movement begun in these days does not end with the departure for Rome: it continues in open dialogue and in a gaze turned towards the future.