LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
ON THE OCCASION OF THE 60th ANNIVERSARY
OF THE LATIN AMERICAN EPISCOPAL COUNCIL (CELAM)

Dear Brother,

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM), I wish to join you in prayerful thanksgiving for all the good that the Lord has sown, which has borne fruit through your service to God’s Church in Latin America.

I hope that CELAM, while maintaining pastoral and missionary conversion as a priority, may increasingly be a participant, support and glimmering catalyst of this evangelizing movement to all environments and peripheries. It is important that our communities be “homes and schools of communion,” that they attract through their extraordinary fraternity, founded on the recognition of our common Father, and that they always help to keep alive the Latin American Church’s passion for our people, the assumption of their suffering and the capacity of Christian discernment of the vicissitudes of their present history, in order to open paths of greater equity, peace and justice.

The forthcoming opening of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy will be an event of grace, in which CELAM will carry out an essential service of liveliness, exchange and celebration.

Dear Brother, in conveying my most cordial greetings of earnest esteem, I impart to all CELAM’s members and collaborators and to the whole Latin American and Caribbean Episcopate, my Apostolic Blessing, placing all of these intentions under the tilma [mantle] of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of America, so that through her intercession Our Lord Jesus Christ will ever inspire new and more holy missionary disciples in our Churches, and more courageous builders of peace and justice in our nations.

Fraternally,

Vatican, 12 October 2015

Francis